Survey : Bootstrappers, what's your running cost per month?
Hey fellow IHers,
I wanted to know how much do you spend on an average per month to keep your side-project/bootstrapped product up and running?
And if you could elaborate a bit on it, what are these costs for? Is it mainly for infra, etc?
Right now my expense of my side project is $15(digital ocean) bill , $10 mailjet bill . With this expense my revenue is $600+/month . My business model is freemium and had a quite good user base almost 50k/month. My startup website url is www.themefisher.com
:)
That's a killer margin! Congrats :) How are you looking to expand? Invest in some other tools?
As its my first side project and I have no knowledge about business . Now planning to make this as my full time job. I got huge clients form my website it is a bonus part . Lets see how can I move. No right now I have no plan to invest on other tools.
Awesome job so far Mehedi! :)
Thanks man .
$5m/month on Digital Ocean, 12$/year for the domain and 2 cents / month on email.
The total is $6.02 in fixed costs, plus 3.5% - 4% of net in Stripe fees depending on my ratio of annual vs monthly signups. Thus far, revenue has been $70 a month, but this month will be much more.
That's nice! You've kept your costs low. But are you looking to get more tools, etc to improve your marketing/business?
Possibly. Once my revenue breaks 1k/month on a regular basis (which may well begin this month), I'll likely invest in a better mic and possibly some YouTube and video-related tools. After 10k/month, I'll probably get a SEMrush subscription and hire an accountant, too. That stage will probably take a while.
At heart, though, I'm more of a builder and a seller than a buyer. I've been investing in building tools to streamline writing and distributing lessons and to improve site SEO. I'm definitely going to be writing my own bandit optimization tools. Nobody knows what I want or need as well as I do, and in time I may even sell those in-house tools to others.
Interesting. More power to you my friend! :)
I'm running https://www.datagekko.com and its a bit more expensive in terms of infrastructure cost. Currently sitting at around 100$ in a low power mode for the beta. Will probably jump up to somewhere between 200$ and 300$ once in full capacity and will only keep growing with increased use and throughput. Other than that only minor expenses such as domain name, coffee and a lot of time. However I'm offsetting a large part of the costs with free credits from the cloud provider but that will only last for a little bit longer and then I'll have to start putting money where my mouth is. Hoping to get some paying customers by then to help reduce the overal upkeep cost.
I run http://getnada.com, costs are mainly CDN ~$50, hosting ~$200 and the hours to maintain it.
Seems a bit steep for a at least seemingly simple service, can you elaborate on why such a high hosting cost?
The problem with these services is when they are popular they are hit buy 100's of emails per second, as more and more spam starts being sent to old mailboxes. In order for the service to work smoothly you need to operate a server with lots of memory and fast disks, and I chose to separate the DB / Redis from the mail server so two servers. I'm sure hosting can be cheaper it's a matter of choosing cost / value
I like the idea and the execution of your project. Do you mind my asking whether you make a profit on this project given you are spending about $250 running this?
Yes, it's profitable, but let's say Ramen profitable :-)
did you see this :
http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2007/01/architecture-of-mailinator.html
super interesting
what stack are you using ?
Nodejs, haraka mail server and mongo, hosting on OVH CDN is cdn 77
Thanks , great to see someone from the neighbourhood (שכונה)
This comment was deleted 8 years ago