Pareto 20, No. 17: Nate Herk, for automation tutorials that publish the bill

He had two coding agents build the same app and posted the token costs: $832 against $2,932. He also reversed his own advice on camera. A partner of the tool he teaches most, which you should know.

Seat 17 on The Pareto 20 is Nate Herk, and it is the no-code end of the automation domain: visual workflow builders, agent templates, and a habit of showing what an experiment cost.

Who he is

Nate Herkelman is an AI automation educator in Chicago who, by his own account, left a business-intelligence role at Goldman Sachs in November 2024 to teach full time. His YouTube channel showed a million subscribers and more than 500 videos when we checked on September 12, 2026, with several uploads in the preceding week. He runs the AI Automation Society, a free community past 455,000 members, a paid tier called Society Plus, and an automation agency, Uppit AI. He is also a verified n8n Expert Partner, which we come back to below.

What to read him for

The same app, two agents, two invoices. His August 14, 2026 post had Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex each build the same production app from the same brief and published the session logs: Claude Code spent $832 in tokens over about five and a half hours with 35 subagents and 2,800 tool calls; Codex spent $2,932 over about 61 hours with 126 subagents and 32,500 tool calls. Codex produced the better-looking result, and he still named what was wrong with it: "the editor was overwhelming and several controls either broke or appeared to be demo-only." That is a first-hand comparison with numbers, which is rarer than the volume of agent content suggests.

Reversing himself in public. I Deleted All My Claude Skills... And Claude Got Smarter (August 12, 2026) walks back his own earlier recommendation after the results changed. A creator willing to do that is worth more than one who is always right.

Model comparisons on real use cases. A September 9, 2026 video runs two frontier models across fifteen practical tasks, and a September 3 post prices two versions of the same model building the same app. The format repeats: same job, two tools, what it cost.

Templates you can actually use. The free community carries more than a hundred n8n templates and downloadable agent skills, which for a non-developer is the fastest way from watching to running.

Start here

The August 14 comparison, then the free community for the templates.

What he sells, and what that means for you

Society Plus at $129 a month or $839 a year (figures from a third-party review that discloses its own affiliate tie to the community; confirm on the page before you pay), the Uppit AI agency, a book, video sponsorships handled through a talent agency, and affiliate codes for a hosting provider and a dictation tool in his video descriptions, without an explicit affiliate label that we could see. The one that matters most: he is an n8n Expert Partner while being one of n8n's most prominent educators, so his coverage of n8n is not independent of n8n. His revenue figures ("$5M+ per year" on his community page) are self-reported. Read the cost comparisons, which are about models rather than his partner's product, with confidence; read the n8n enthusiasm knowing the relationship.

Not for you if

You want the tool question decided by someone with no stake in the answer. For that, Dheeraj Sharma two seats down is the counterweight in the same domain.

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Part of The Pareto 20, twenty creators who get a solo operator most of the way on AI decisions. How we chose them. Facts above were checked against the creator's own pages on September 12, 2026.