How I cut my costs from $61 to ~$0 a month, and became "profitable".

I've been running Jamform for about a year now. A few months ago I got my first paying customer on my $9/month tier. It was motivating, but with how crazy this last year has been I haven't been able to make any progress in acquiring more customers or developing more features. I slowly lost interest in the project and let it basically collect dust, luckily it can pretty much run itself. Unfortunately, to run the app it was costing me about $69/month, which isn't great when I'm only making $9.

The costs were as follows:

$12 - Gsuite - Provided me with a domain email so I could communicate with customers (and manage all my other accounts)
$9 - Mongo Atlas - Database for the service
$20 - Cloudflare - Mostly used to automatically prevent spam in submissions, but other features as well
$15 - Sendgrid - Transactional emails (used for the main feature of sending emails on submissions)
$5 - Digital Ocean Spaces - File hosting for form attachments

All of these services seemed completely necessary when I was a wide-eyed dreamer developing the project and picturing the $XXXX/MRR I'd have to cover it. But reality was quite different and I was bleeding money every month. I wanted to fix it, but at this point it seemed like it'd be too difficult to refactor everything and change all these service.

The fix:

Today I decided enough was enough, life events came up and I couldn't bear throwing away money anymore. I had two options, shut everything down which seemed like the easy option, or plug the leaks and keep Jamform alive. I chose options number two and got to work.

$0 - Gmail - To replace Gsuite I created a new Gmail account for free. It obviously doesn't look as professional but this is solved with the next item.
$0 - ForwardEmail - This service allows you to use DNS to forward emails from any domain email to your Gmail account. Now any emails send to *@jamform.com are received in my Gmail account.
**~$0 - Mongo Serverless ** - Instead of using my shared Mongo tier at a fixed rate of $9/mo I switched over to a Mongo Serverless database which uses a pay as you go model. At my current utilization I'll be paying practically nothing for the service. I simply transferred over all the data from the current DB and pointed my application to the new DB.
$0 - No Cloudflare - I was using Cloudflare primarily for spam protection in my form submissions, however it wasn't doing a very good job anyway. So I cancelled my subscription and instead I'm going to push harder for users to take advantage of the built in honeypots fields and ReCaptcha. If needed I'll look into Akismet for spam protection for $8/mo and still save money, but it;s not needed yet.
$0- Sendgrid - When I first launched I received a ton of interest from sites like Product Hunt. Mostly just curious people who never converted past the free tier. However, it was enough interest to push me past the 10,000/mo email cap on the Sendgrid free tier. I upgraded to the $14/mo plan and everything was great. However, after that traffic died down it was no longer necessary, I was sending <100 email month which the free tier allots that many PER DAY. So I quickly just downgraded my account. If my traffic rises again I'll be switching to Mailgun as they also have a usage based plan that can scale with me.
$0 - AWS S3 - I love DO Spaces for their simplicity in file storage, but the fixed cost of $5/mo is charged whether you're using it or not. So instead I switched all my images over to AWS S3. This is another usage based plan so currently I'll be playing nearly $0 for my usage. If the charges start rising to high I'll likely switch back to DO or explore new options like Cloudinary or others.

Total

All in all, I went from paying $61/mo to nearly $0/mo. I'm also retained my $9/mo user so I'm now making money every month instead of losing it. This sheds a LOT of stress and gives me a lot more runway to make improvements and continue forward with Jamform. In the end, it only took about 6 hours to make the switch after I'd been putting it off for months and costing me hundreds of dollars.