One of the things that I was curious about when starting to build my SaSS side project was the potential costs involved. I had no idea if it would be affordable to launch an app if it were to make no money. Obviously, the costs involved in launching anything online are generally much less than building anything in real life. However, I am usually reluctant to start spending money on a side project that I don't know would be profitable.
Luckily, my side project, , so using that API and bearing the costs was the only option. However, the costs related to OpenAI were negligible. I paid only a few dollars for the first few months.
The costs have scaled with an increase in usage. However, I find the costs acceptable since they scale proportionally to my revenue and usage. I currently offer multiple models on my website (from OpenAI, ). The total cost varies but is around 150$ a month.
Hosting (20$/month)
The second cost that I started to incur was due to Vercel. I am using was the obvious choice for hosting. They are very generous with their free plan, and I didn't expect to pay anything for a long time. However, I noticed they had a very strict timeout policy on server endpoints, which dropped long-running requests after a few seconds. I started to get user complaints where they wouldn't get any responses for longer queries. It was obvious that I had to switch to a Pro plan. The good thing is that you can have multiple projects in your Vercel Pro Plan, which could be like a shared cost between multiple projects.
Analytics (15$/month)
After some time, I needed to start paying for my analytics provider, . I am really happy with them; they only cost a few dollars a month.
Email (10$/month)
As Heuristica became more popular, I needed a professional-looking email address, so I signed up for two business email accounts on Gmail.
Authentication (0$/month)
I have been a developer for a while, but I still feel uncomfortable rolling out my authentication solution. When building Heuristica, I was delighted to have discovered as my cloud database provider. I am very happy with them, and just like Clerk, they also have an incredibly generous free tier. I could have kept using them for free, but I wanted to have the option of having daily database backups so as not to lose any customer data, so I recently switched to a paid account.
Error Logging (26$/month)
I initially used Bugsnag to be notified about production errors. However, I switched to because it has many good features at an affordable price point. In my experience, email marketing tools can be pretty expensive, so I am happy to have discovered Brevo.
SEO (100$/month)
I eventually made my peace with email marketing, but I still dread marketing in general. That's why I like the idea of SEO, which performs like passive marketing in some sense. I used to have a Keysearch membership, but I wasn't sure about the accuracy of some of the results I was getting on my keyword research. I ended up getting an for a few days to see how much of a productivity boost it provides. It helps me build features faster and completely removes some of the more mindless, boilerplate-y aspects of coding, so you have more mental capacity to focus on the important stuff. The return on investment is crazy with this one.
Transactional Emails (0$/month)
It took me a while to realize I needed to email my users about specific actions (like subscriptions) for a much better user experience. Initially, my customers didn't even know if they had successfully subscribed since I didn't send any confirmation emails. I ended up using is perfect for emitting events on user actions and creating dashboards around those events. Currently, I am still using the free tier of the tool, which only allows for visualizing a limited amount of metrics. However, I can see myself switching to a paid tier if I ever get more data-oriented with my production development.
Amplitude is super easy to setup so my suggestion would be to install this as soon as you can to be able to collect even more metrics.
Customer Support (0$/month)
I am using Crisp to have a chat bubble on my website. I can't recommend having this feature on your app enough. Most of the questions you receive will be just noise; however, some of the interactions you will have with your users and prospective customers will be priceless. A chat bubble is not only great for user support but also a powerful tool for user research and understanding customer intentions and sentiments. Crisp has a generous free tier that is currently sufficient for my purposes.
Total Costs (~400$/month)
All these costs add up to almost 400$ a month. These are also some other recurring costs I incur while running my side project. However, some other costs are specific to my platform's features, like integration with different APIs. These costs would be irrelevant to other projects.
If I were to cut costs, I would switch back to Keysearch from Ahrefs and downgrade Sentry to use the free tier. Anything else would be more difficult to get rid of.
When I started Heuristica, I was very frugal. However, as the platform became profitable and popular, my mindset shifted. Previously, my decisions were based on solving problems using the most cost-effective way possible (or for free). Now, I am always looking for opportunities to add value to the platform for a reasonable cost. Time is my most limited asset, and I am more than happy to spend money to solve problems instead of tackling them myself.
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