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

说明与用途

开发者估算了 UseHourly 项目的托管、邮件和域名每月费用，以及 AI 助手 Claude 的费用。总成本约为 26 美元/月，即使在 10,000 名活跃用户的情况下也保持在 25–30 美元左右。如果费用超过 100 美元，将寻求赞助。

问题

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.

结果

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.

工作流

• 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.

证据

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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