Marketing Agency (cloud-scheduled agents)

Three AI agents now run my marketing on a cron schedule. Not a metaphor — a literal Cloud Scheduler config.

The three:

• Content pipeline — runs Tuesdays. Pulls from a backlog of post ideas, drafts a LinkedIn post and a blog draft, saves to a draft folder.
• Lead follow-up — runs every weekday morning. Reads yesterday's inbound forms, drafts personalised replies, queues them for review.
• Weekly report — runs Sunday nights. Summarises new leads, content shipped, social engagement; emails a brief.

All three run as Cloud Run jobs triggered by Google Cloud Scheduler. The "agent" framing is honestly generous — none of them have free will. They're scheduled deterministic LLM calls with structured output.

That's the design choice, not a limitation. For most "agent" workflows in a small business, you don't need autonomy. You need reliability and predictability on a schedule.

Three observations from running this for several weeks:

• The cost is trivial. With Gemini Flash and tight context, the entire stack runs for less than a single SaaS marketing tool's monthly fee.
• The reliability is high. Cron + structured output + Cloud Run logs is more dependable than any autonomous agent I've shipped.
• The leverage is real. A solo founder gets a marketing department on the cost of a coffee.

Most things called "agents" today are scheduled LLM calls with extra steps. That's not a criticism — scheduled LLM calls work, and the boring versions ship reliably while the autonomous versions get debugged.