What it costs to start an open source project (my real numbers)

Описание и применение

Разработчик оценил ежемесячные расходы на хостинг, email и домен для проекта UseHourly, а также стоимость AI‑ассистента Claude. Общая стоимость составляет около 26 USD в месяц, а при 10 000 активных пользователей она остаётся примерно 25–30 USD. При превышении 100 USD планируется привлечение спонсоров.

Задача

A developer wants to understand the ongoing costs of hosting and maintaining an open‑source web app (UseHourly) and how those costs scale with user growth.

Результат

The project costs about $26/month to run, with an additional $20–$100 for the AI assistant. Even with 10,000 active users, the total remains roughly $25–$30/month, largely due to generous free tiers in hosting and email services.

Рабочий процесс

• 1. Host the app and database on Cloudflare’s minimum paid plan – $5/month.
• 2. Use Resend Pro for email delivery – $20/month.
• 3. Register and renew the domain usehourly.app – ~$1/month.
• 4. Run CI/CD with CircleCI free plan – $0/month.
• 5. Pay for Claude AI assistant – $20/month for Pro or $100/month for Max.
• 6. Estimate scaling costs by assuming each user is active 20 days/month with few requests – results in ~$25–$30/month for 10,000 users.

Доказательства

Cloudflare (hosting and database) $5

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Resend (email) $20

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Domain (usehourly.app) $1 for the first year, about $12 a year after that (about $1 a month)

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AI coding assistant (Claude) $20 on the Pro plan, which should be enough for most people. I pay $100 for Max because I work on about five projects at the same time, so UseHourly is only part of that.

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Running it (hosting, email, domain) about $26 a month

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Running it plus the assistant about $46 a month on the $20 plan (about $126 with the $100 plan I use for all my projects)

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Rough total a month about $25 to $30 for 10,000 users

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