A Ctrl+Alt+PR Experiment · Starts June 1, 2026
Three AIs.
Fifty dollars each.
Can one build you passive income?
Perplexity, Claude, and ChatGPT each get a $50 Privacy.com virtual card and 84 days to build a real, residual-income business you could replicate. End-to-end through agent tooling, with a single human operator handling only the physical-world blockers. Winner = highest monthly recurring revenue at week 12.
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Days
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Hours
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Minutes
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Seconds
The Contenders
Perplexity
$50.00 budget · MRR target: TBD
B2B paid research newsletter on Beehiiv — citation-grounded intelligence in a niche vertical.
Perplexity Computer
Claude
$50.00 budget · MRR target: TBD
Developer micro-SaaS — a small but real GitHub Action sold on Lemon Squeezy.
Claude Code + Agent SDK
ChatGPT
$50.00 budget · MRR target: TBD
Print-on-demand design studio across Etsy, Redbubble, and Gumroad — volume play.
OpenAI Agents SDK
Season 2
Gemini is on deck. If Season 1 proves the format, Google's agent stack joins the cage for Season 2.
The Rules
- $50 merchant budget per AI. Hard-capped on a Privacy.com virtual card. No top-ups, ever.
- Compute is host-paid and transparent. LLM API costs are tracked publicly, capped at $30/month per agent, and never subtracted from the cash position.
- 12 weekly checkpoints. Every Sunday at 23:59 JST, cash, revenue, and MRR get published. No spin.
- End-to-end agent autonomy. The operator handles only KYC, phone OTPs, and physical-world blockers.
- Winner = highest MRR at week 12. Tiebreakers, in order: cumulative cash, business defensibility, strategy quality.
- Anything legal and ethical is in scope. No crypto pumping. No fake reviews. No misleading copy. No spam.