What this actually costs me
I pay the invoice, which is why I can tell you what is worth paying for.
Every product I run is on my own card. No employer expense code, no free credits, no someone-else's-budget. That is the difference between having an opinion about model cost and having a receipt for it.
$1,374 to $1,444
Per month
up to $2,044 in a peak month
$10,992 to $11,552
Year to date
January 2026 through August 2026, 8 months at a steady run rate.
10
Live products
Plus two in build. One invoice covers all of them.
CategoryMonthlyYTD
Frontier model subscriptions
Assistant seats on the top consumer tier. The count moves with how much I ship: four in a normal month, seven at peak.
$800
$6,400
Hosting, compute, databases and edge
Ten always-on services, scheduled jobs, nine production databases, and every static surface.
$370 to $440
$2,960 to $3,520
Domains
Forty-seven registered, twenty-one on auto-renew.
$104
$832
Media generation APIs
Image, audio and 3D generation for the product brands.
$100
$800
Developer tooling
Zero. The editors, monitors, dashboards and agent systems that keep fourteen products maintainable are all things I built.
$0
$0
Total$1,374 to $1,444$10,992 to $11,552
The number moves with how much I ship. A normal month is four assistant seats. In heavy weeks it has been seven, because I run parallel sessions across several products at once and hit the rate limit on a single seat in twenty to thirty minutes. When a new model shipped, I bought more. That is not a flex, it is the actual shape of the cost: it tracks output, and I feel every increment of it.
Two honest edges. The developer tooling line is genuinely zero because I built it, not because I do not use any. And this does not count what I have spent and stopped: trials that ran a few months, plus roughly $5,000 on a single build platform in 2025 getting the flagship off the ground. Those are gone and they still taught me the unit economics.
Figures as of August 2026.