How much money have I spent on my SaaS startup since inception?
I've been building Luna for almost 1 year now. It's a markdown editor that doubles as a website builder (with forms, buttons, etc...)
It's been a very enjoyable journey; I'll be sharing the lessons I've learnt and the mistakes I've made this past year so that you don't have to. Today's topic concerns how much money I've spent on my startup to date.
tldr;
$1,304.78 over 8 months.
Breakdown
- Digital Ocean - $1,044.96 over 8 months
- Kubernetes - $32.10/month
- Database - $40.13/month
- Droplets - $28.09/month
- Container Registry - $6.69/month
- S3 Bucket - $6.69/month
- Taxes - $14.78/month
- Google Workspace - $83.22 over 8 months
- Namecheap - $64.60 for domain purchases
- FlatIcon - $112.00 over 7 months
Takeaways
- Infrastructure is by far my biggest cost. I spend about $130 on infrastructure every month. I'll be doing a deep dive into how I've deployed my app in a future blog. I could spend 1-2 weeks optimizing my infrastructure to bring the cost down to $40/month while maintaining the same performance, but I'm okay with swallowing the higher expenses and focusing on development instead.
- I'll have spent over $100 by the end of the year for my Google Workspace subscription. It's what allows me to have a custom domain for my email: app@onluna.io. It's an expense I would recommend avoiding. It's only necessary when dealing with customers but not when you're pre-release.
- My FlatIcon subscription seems expensive considering the free alternatives available for developers (e.g. Font Awesome). However, free icon packs are limited and don't have all the icons I need for my app. The alternative is to create the icons myself or buy them from existing packs. I prefer buying my icons because they seem simple enough but once you start creating one it's easy to spin your wheels and hinder productivity.
