Did I just waste a month building an AI with free tools or is this normal?

Started my first AI project using only free tiers of Hugging Face, Google Colab, and random GitHub repos. Got it to kinda work... then it broke when I tried to scale it. Like, "why does my 10-line script now take 3 hours to run?" broke.

Anyone else hit this wall where the free stuff works great until you actually need it to? What’s the move when your budget is literally zero but your ambition isn’t?