My monthly costs are $223 - what are yours?
Here's an update on what I currently spend money on. It's probably a good idea if you are making a SAAS to look at what an indie hacker actually pays for. I'm pretty frugal/tight with expenses so I'm sure there are other things people might pay for which I don't.
Monthly expenses of an indie hacker
• Mailchimp: $65 - email software
• Ghost for No CS Degree: $29 - blogging
• Email Octopus : $25 - email software - get $15 off your first payment with this link
• Riverside : $19 - podcast recording
• Transistor: $19 - podcast hosting
• Ghost for this blog: $15/m - blogging
• Descript: $15/m - podcast editing
Sheet2Site: $120/year so $10/m - website builder
• Gumroad $10 - selling products
• Track My Audience $4 - track social media and email marketing metrics
• Carrd - $2/m ($24/year in sale) - website builder
Total: $223
I also got a few things for free as I was a really early user like Simple Analytics. This is another reason to hang out in maker communities as you can sometimes get in early and be a beta user and save money in the long run.
Things I'm considering paying for soon - Ubersuggest and Loom
The most costly expense I'm paying for is mailchimp and slack honestly. Goes anywhere in the range of $1000-$1200.
Oh, I always enjoy threads like this. Here's mine. Background: ~$5k MRR consumer SaaS, ~700 customers, true side project (0-20hr/mon)
There's a longer tail of smaller stuff.
So about $500/mon, a margin I am happy with. Of course not factoring incidental costs and expenditures, the odd "I should buy this domain name" :), and the biggest hidden cost of them all - my time.
Shameless plug. If you have Python or Node stack https://appliku.com/ can help drive costs of running apps 2-3 times less.
Also, you probably will be able to fit in the generous free plan.
Actual hosting will be on AWS since you are already using it.
Drop a Twitter DM if interested. Will be happy to assist/answer questions.
Examples:
Appliku helped a relatively startup to save around $7k/mo by moving part of the load from Heroku to DO/AWS.
https://unicornplatform.com/ reduced costs 3 times.
Have a great day!
The Appliku fan here.
It makes my GitHub -> AWS deployment process a breeze. It literally takes one button clicked and the code is deployed. Pure magic ✨
Good to know the heroku bill for $5k MRR!
99% margins are acceptable, haha
Yes! I'm definitely being a bit "margin inefficient", but even as is, it's well exceeding my goals.
Not burning $$ on FB/Google ads is a big factor; of course, we'll see if growth tops out and makes some margin erosion for paid marketing a necessary evil..
$1000 - google cloud compute. 4 nodes of varying size + GPU for data processing.
Of course all scenarios are different based on scale and where the value proposition is... anyway, here are my costs:
TOTAL: $14
In my case (dailytics.com), the value proposition is in the report emails that I send, not in using the app itself, so the main process that runs in that DO server is the cronjob that generates the emails.
My plan is to switch from Sendgrid to OhMySMTP as soon as I get more paying customers.
I have two private apps written in Django for a government agency in my country. Both uses heavily Django Admin in order two capture information (historical records of government program ) and a few ChartJS for show Stadistics. I have contract for two years deployment and hosting, in the most used scenario I have 50 concurrent users . I have both deployments in a VPS. I pay $3.50 for the server in Hetzner and, that includes a daily backup for the server. That's all.
Sorry I forgot. $0.10 for Amazon SES.
I use appliku.com for 2 of my django apps, so my current costs are as follows:
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