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49 Comments

What are your monthly business expenses?

Here are mine to start. I am just about to launch and am pre-customers.

Heroku: $7
Versoly: $15
Intercom: $50
Total: $72

I wouldn't usually use Intercom this early but my product is built on Intercom and I need the upgraded account for testing features and understanding my users.

Interested to hear your costs!

  1. 3

    Food - $150 and Hosting Fees - $50

    1. 2

      Heh, interesting! It's weird that we never think of ourselves in terms of cost. I mean, we take care of the servers, the code and the users. The product needs us. And we need to eat. Right?

      1. 2

        Hey true.

        Those are literally my only expenses.

        Every cent counts when you on your way to independence i.e. breakeven or Raman profitability.

        I find it to difficult to manage working a full-time job so I stopped and instead I cut my business expenses to almost 0 and I do a little freelance work. This allows me most of the time to focus on building.

  2. 3

    $0 😄

    I keep everything I make 👍

    1. 1

      How? Do you run your own servers from home? Even then you'd pay electricity bill.

      1. 2

        I don't need to buy servers. I just use Netlify to host BuildFaster and I sell on Gumroad.

        1. 1

          Ah, that makes sense.

          1. 1

            Well, this will not be the case soon because I will buy a domain for myself which will cost about $30 USD /mo

            1. 1

              What?! Are you buying second-hand? Otherwise which TLD costs $360 to register? I registered .co for 8 or 9 bucks.

              1. 1

                Shoot! I meant to say that I am buying a .io domain for $30 A YEAR

                Sorry 😂

                1. 1

                  you can buy a domain from google for $12/year

                  1. 1

                    I am buying a .io domain. On google domains it is about $40 a year but on namecheap it is ~ $30

                2. 1

                  Phew! That sounds much better lol. It's a good investment, too. A custom domain will look much more professional and trustable than a netlify subdomain.

  3. 3

    For Mailspree I have following costs (It's in early pre-launch, still the stack is already served):

    • Netlify (Frontend with website is served there) - Free
    • Heroku (Backend is currently served there, but I already deployed the backend on AWS too) - Free (GitHub Student gives you Heroku Credits to serve your application on a Hobby Dyno)
    • AWS (E-Mail Server is hosted there, Backend is already deployed too) - Free (I got $1,000 in AWS Credits through AWS Activate)
    • Penta (German online bank) - 9€ (about $10)
    • Lexoffice (German bookkeeping service) - Free

    Total: 9€ (or $10)

    And that's about it for now. I will pay more for Lexoffice, Penta, AWS and Netlify in the future and also add services for support etc. which will be much more expensive but I'll try to keep costs as low as possible.

  4. 3

    Up to 150$ for DO servers... =\

    1. 1

      Nice, what are you hosting?

      Are you self hosting like DB, Redis etc?

      1. 1

        Yep, mysql, redis and nodes which are located in different countries. Mostly because of them it got expensive, since if I had one server it could be like 5-10$.

        1. 1

          Host them all in one server, with Docker compose, via Digital Ocean?

          1. 1

            My app should send http requests to other sites from different locations. Like I need servers which are located in different regions.

          2. 0

            Geo-based latency my guy. If @Akcium has visitor from all over the world they want a fast site - which you can only get with physically closer servers to the client computer.

            1. 1

              A CDN would probably be the better option than trying to re-invent it yourself with hosting app servers close to the edge.

  5. 2

    We’re spending around $129/month, and I hope to keep it that way for a while 🤞

    Here’s a breakdown of our costs:

    AWS (EC2, Cloudfront, S3): ~$50/month
    Currency Converter API: $5/month
    Intercom: $39/month
    Hotjar: $29/month
    G Suite: $6/month

  6. 2

    Around $135.

    ~$120 to DigitalOcean:

    • $15/mo for managed PostgreSQL
    • $15/mo for managed Redis
    • $10/mo for Spaces (DigitalOcean's version of S3)
    • $5/mo for my backend server
    • $5/mo for my load balancer
    • ~$70/mo for render workers that are spun up dynamically when someone renders a video

    $10/mo to Postmark for email.
    $7/mo to Papertrail for logs.

    1. 1

      Is Postmark really good? I have just used SES in the past. but I keep hearing Postmark come up so thinking about using that.

      1. 2

        I haven’t used SES — I avoid AWS altogether because they provide technology to police and ICE — so I can’t speak to the difference in developer experience. But I used SendGrid before switching to Postmark, and Postmark is significantly better.

      2. 2

        Postmark is worlds better than SES in terms of developer experience. I think IH is using them as well.

  7. 2

    Zoom: $15
    Intercom: $50
    Sketch: $18
    Total: $83

    Hoping to keep costs down 😅

  8. 2

    I pay about 50€ a month for the domain portfolio that i own and a private freelancer network membership (100€ a month). When my new product launches, we'll see if I blow up my CC in Firebase, lol.

  9. 2

    I'm building a business specifically focused on teaching, so my expenses may look a little different than a traditional indie hacker.

    Podia - $68
    Bubble - $16
    G Suite - $6
    Calendly - $15
    Zoom - $15
    Wordpress via Bluehost - $8

  10. 2

    Product
    https://melbado.com/

    Expenses
    Heroku: $7
    plus minor costs for the domain

    Honestly, I think the most important investment for startups is your time investment.

    1. 1

      For sure! If there are ways I can spend money to save a lot of time I will do it!

  11. 2

    I can't think of any.
    I work out of my bedroom, and my total monthly expenses are basically my living expenses.

    I didn't want to take on any additional fixed costs per month when I started freelancing. Therefore, I never set up a team and never rented office space. It has helped me say no to projects that I don't want to take.

  12. 2

    Lightsail: $25

    That's about it, although the domain also costs a bit.

  13. 2

    My infra is on Google Cloud and Firebase. Cloud functions, Firestore, Realtime DB and cloud storage, to be precise. Monthly expenditure is about 350$-370$.
    Honestly, I don't know if this is too high or normal for serving 35k active users.

    1. 2

      Interesting! I'm in the process of building my app and I try to optimise as much as I can as it's hard for me to predict how those costs will grow on Firebase. At this stage, are you considering to move to custom solution?

    2. 2

      DAU? Then it would say it's fairly normal. Really depends on the way your application is structured i would say. Firestore is usually the biggest expense on a Firebase bill.

      1. 1

        I meant Weekly active users. Yes, Firestore it is. Took much optimisation to bring the cost down though.

        1. 1

          And changing infrastructure was not an option? Idk what kind of revenue you make, but 35k WAU seems like you should consider changing to a cheaper stack in the future if you keep growing.

  14. 2

    Linode VPS: $10
    ScraperAPI: $29

  15. 2

    Interesting I thought Heroku would be more expensive.

    When does the price start increasing?

    1. 2

      Good question. I'm just on the cheapest hobby level. I can buy more dynos when I need them. Not exactly sure how many I'll need but I think I should be good with just this for awhile. Seems to be working pretty well so far.

      1. 2

        You can stay on free dynos for years if your traffic isnt insane and your page load times are reasonable (around 200-300ms). I'm speaking from personal experience running apps that have thousands of requests a day.

  16. 1

    45$ (webflow + memberstack)

  17. 1

    For Letterbase, I use:

    • Fathom Analytics ($14)
    • GSuite ($6)
  18. 1

    We only have a 10 dollar server on DigitalOcean for now. Thinking of subscribing to Canny as soon as we get some actual traction.

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