With more websites being launched in this niche every week, it feels like something is off. Too many websites are doing the same thing, in the same way, and have the same look.
Why people bother making so many of these
First off, the barrier of entry is low. For a basic website, most of the heavy lifting is done by a popular LLM, and the same AI can build most, or all of the presentation layer even if you've never written a single line of code in your life.
The landing pages of most of the top search results for such services look very familiar: A large heading promising the moon, a white or very pale background, with a lot of gradients, very rounded corners, and unsubstantiated social proof that contradicts the website's organic traffic estimates.
Secondly, the margins are huge, an AI tailoring request can cost less than a cent in AI API usage, but they're charging 20 Dollars for a month of usage. A user would have to generate thousands of resumes monthly to get their money's worth for a subscription.
What are the alternatives?
Well, using a free template or truly free resume builder can help and be a great help if you do the tailoring yourself. But what if you want to do it at scale, say, 5 resume applications per day, that's 100 resumes used a month. Surely you want a faster way, right?
If so, you're the perfect target for the freemium trap. You get meager usage(1-5 resumes) for free and then you can't use the platform for anything before paying the subscription fee, despite the website advertising itself as "free", so you have no choice but to spend your money.
Avoid falling for the trap
That's why we built and open-sourced NAAW -Not Another AI Wrapper, a handy tool to use if you want to go the cheaper way of paying for your own usage. You can easily have the AI generate dozens(if not hundreds) of resumes for $1-$2 dollars in token costs and just pay for the usage, rather than an exorbitant platform free.
It even has a flamboyant landing page like almost all the resume builders in the space, you can use it from the website itself, or download it from GitHub and running the code yourself, for free.
The usage of the tool is pretty straightforward, the most important buttons are in the header container:
NAAW header, showing the overview button, and an unauthenticated session(with AI functionalities greyed out)
These buttons control the AI functionalities
1. You authenticate your session with an Open AI API key
The authentication request accepts your desired model and API key as inputs. We don't store these and this app is a frontend-only application, so it never reaches our servers.
After Authentication, the button in the header container turns green and starts displaying an estimated usage for the session(click to expand)
2. After authenticating, the import and tailoring functionalities unlock
The default session state looks like this:
3. Import your existing resume and the AI will fit it into the template we're using(this is sent to ChatGPT for processing)
4. After waiting for the process to finish, the editor will be populated with your own data, and you can start editing your resume, using it as a base for tailoring requests or the ATS score checker
Live preview loaded the previous file:
AI operations subtract credit from your API key, a cost analysis for the operations so far shows the ingestion cost us ~0.2 cents:
5. Sample AI score check(used the previous python developer resume for a C#/.NET developer job description)
Sample output for the ATS check shows weak scoring because there are different stacks involved
6. Sample AI tailoring output
Sample output making slight adjustments
7. Sample ATS score recheck for the new resume
The score went up because of the tailoring, more keywords are covered but there are still actionable suggestions to edit
Final cost: A bit less than 1 cent for the total list of operations(import CV, initial scoring, tailoring, scoring again)
Total cost including the breakdown per operation type for the current session, opened by clicking the green header button
In short, rather than spending 20 dollars a month for a subscription, you could pay for your own tokens and get 2000 of these batches of operations. Even more than that, if you just keep your sample JSON and don't need to keep reimporting or checking ATS scores.
You may also pick more advanced reasoning options or more expensive models, but in any case, 20 dollars in API tokens will take you a long way, and won't expire in a month of usage. You only pay for what you use yourself and don't need to remember to cancel subscriptions if you don't needed anymore.
In fact, I'd suggest not even funding the API key with 20 dollars, as that is likely overkill for what a reasonable person needs in terms of job applications in a month.
Conclusion:
If you don't mind creating an API key and funding your Open AI account, you can use https://naaw.atshelper.com/resume-builder or clone the public https://github.com/gab16software/naaw-resumes GitHub repository to run the software yourself locally, to get vastly more functionality out of your money.
PDF and JSON generations are not capped and don't incur AI costs so you can do that as many times as you want.
As a bonus, our main resume builder at https://atshelper.com also accepts the same JSON structure if you export your NAAW resume as JSON, allowing you to save your resumes to our cloud for later reuse, also completely free, if you just sign up.
The main website also has its own AI integration that uses local AI rather than cloud based, so it requires no API keys, costs nothing, and won't send your data to external API providers.
Additionally, the main website has more templates and customization options that work with the same JSON structure.