My Indie Hacker Infrastructure Costs $452/month — Here's Where It Actually Goes

Nobody talks about the real cost of being an indie hacker. Not the code. Not the marketing. The long tail of tools and services that quietly drain your bank account while you're busy shipping features.

I recently sat down and audited every single subscription, service, and domain renewal attached to my projects. 27 domains. 55 deployed apps. 30+ SaaS subscriptions. Bills arriving in USD, EUR, and TWD (Taiwan dollars, because apparently I signed up for something while traveling and forgot about it). The total: $452/month.

Here's where it actually goes.

The full breakdown

AI Assistants: $281/month (62% of total)

This is the number that surprised me.

| Service | Monthly | |---------|---------| | Claude Max | $235 | | ChatGPT Plus | $20 | | Gemini Advanced | $26 |

Claude Max is my biggest single line item. More than all my hosting combined. More than my domains. More than everything else except the other AI tools. I use it for coding, architecture decisions, debugging, writing, research -- it replaced a dozen tools I used to pay for separately. Whether that's a good deal depends on how much you ship, but for me the math works.

ChatGPT Plus at $20 is mostly for second opinions and image generation. Gemini Advanced at $26 handles high-volume classification tasks where I need something cheap and fast. Three AI subscriptions feels excessive until you realize they replaced my Stack Overflow reflex, half my documentation tools, and most of my rubber duck debugging.

Hosting: $63/month

| Service | Monthly | What it runs | |---------|---------|-------------| | Vercel Pro | $20 | Main apps, 16 cron jobs, 300s function timeout | | Supabase Pro | $34 | Postgres + pgvector, auth, storage | | Netlify | $9 | Legacy static sites I should migrate | | Fly.io | $0.03 | One tiny always-on service |

This is the category where I feel the best about spending. $63/month for production hosting across multiple apps, databases, cron infrastructure, and auth is genuinely cheap. Five years ago this stack would have cost $300+/month on Heroku or AWS.

The Fly.io line is my favorite. Three cents. I checked twice. It's a small Go service that runs 24/7 and costs less than a gumball.

Dev Tools: $45/month

| Service | Monthly | |---------|---------| | n8n Cloud | $31 | | ngrok | $10 | | GitHub Pro | $4 |

n8n is the biggest one here. I use it as a thin webhook trigger layer -- it catches events and routes them, but never owns state. The $31/month sometimes feels steep for what amounts to a fancy webhook relay, but building and hosting that myself would cost more in time.

ngrok at $10 is one of those tools I can't quit. Every time I try to replace it with a free alternative, I come crawling back within a week. Local development tunnels that just work are worth $10.

GitHub Pro at $4 is almost invisible. I forget I pay for it.

Domains: $46/month (amortized)

This is where it gets interesting. I own 27 domains across four TLDs. Here's what they actually cost per year:

| TLD | Cost/year each | Count | |-----|---------------|-------| | .com | ~$10 | 15 | | .dev | ~$12 | 7 | | .app | ~$14 | 3 | | .ai | ~$140 | 2 |

The .ai domains cost $140/year EACH. That's 14x a .com. Every year I look at those renewal notices and think "do I really need this?" Every year I pay it because some part of my brain insists the domain is going to be worth something someday. This is the domain hoarder's version of sunk cost fallacy and I'm fully aware of it.

All 27 domains are on Cloudflare Registrar, which at least means I'm paying at-cost with no markup. Small comfort when you're paying $140 for two letters and a TLD.

AI APIs: $7/month

| Service | Monthly | |---------|---------| | Anthropic API | $6.56 | | OpenAI API | $0 | | Google AI | $0 |

This is separate from the AI assistant subscriptions above. These are API costs for my processing pipeline -- classification, embeddings, entity extraction.

OpenAI is $0 because I'm still burning through credits. Google AI is $0 because Gemini Flash through the API is free within generous limits. The $6.56 on Anthropic is Claude Sonnet calls for complex synthesis tasks that Gemini Flash can't handle well.

The total API cost being $7/month while running a processing pipeline that handles hundreds of ingestions is genuinely impressive. Free tiers and credits are doing heavy lifting here.

Personal: $11/month

| Service | Monthly | |---------|---------| | 1Password | $4 | | Viber | $2 | | Duolingo | $5 |

These aren't infrastructure, but they showed up in the audit so I'm including them. The Duolingo subscription was a surprise -- I'd stopped using it months ago and it was still charging me. Failed payments, retry, succeed, charge. The zombie subscription pattern.

The surprises

AI is 62% of my total spend. I knew AI tools were expensive. I didn't realize they were more than everything else combined. Claude Max alone is 3.7x my entire hosting bill. A year ago my biggest expense was hosting. Now it's not even close.

Free tiers that actually work. Cloudflare Workers and Pages run 55 of my deployed apps for exactly $0. Not "free tier with asterisks" -- genuinely free, with generous limits I've never hit. If you're an indie hacker and you're not deploying static sites and small APIs on Cloudflare, you're leaving money on the table.

Cost creep is real and sneaky. During this audit I found three subscriptions I'd forgotten about entirely. One had been charging me through a card I rarely check. Another was a tool I'd tried for a week, decided against, and never cancelled. The third was Duolingo, silently renewing despite months of inactivity. Total waste found: about $17/month, or $204/year. Not life-changing money, but not nothing either.

The multi-currency mess. My bills arrive in three currencies. Most services charge in USD. A European tool charges in EUR. Something I signed up for in Taiwan charges in TWD. My credit card converts everything at different rates on different days. Reconciling this manually is painful enough that I mostly don't, which means my totals are approximate. If you're an indie hacker billing across multiple currencies, you probably don't know your real costs either.

Domains are a psychological trap. I don't need 27 domains. I actively use maybe 12. But every time a renewal comes up for one of the unused ones, I think: "What if I need this next month?" So I renew it. $10 feels trivial in isolation. $550/year for digital real estate I'm not using feels less trivial.

How I track it now

I used to not track it at all. That's how I ended up with forgotten subscriptions and a vague sense that "things cost about $400/month, probably."

Now I do a monthly audit that takes about 5 minutes. I use a Claude session in the browser to visit all my billing pages (Vercel, Supabase, Cloudflare, Stripe, etc.), extract the current charges, and output a structured table. I paste that into a spending dashboard. The whole thing is semi-manual on purpose -- billing pages change their HTML constantly, and a fully automated scraper would break every month and create more maintenance work than it saves.

The structured output goes into a simple tracking sheet. Month over month, I can see when costs change and why. The $34 Supabase Pro line has been stable for months. The API costs fluctuate based on how much I'm building. The AI subscriptions only go up, apparently.

The real takeaway

The real cost of being an indie hacker isn't servers. It hasn't been servers for years. Hosting is commoditized and cheap. The real cost is the long tail of tools -- the AI subscriptions, the dev tools, the domains you're hoarding, the SaaS products you tried once and forgot to cancel.

$452/month is $5,424/year. That's real money. Not startup-burn-rate money, but real money for a solo builder. And I'm confident most indie hackers with a similar number of projects are spending in the same range without knowing their exact number.

Track everything. Do the audit. You'll find waste you didn't know about, patterns you didn't expect, and at least one subscription that's been charging a card you forgot existed.

The spreadsheet is less fun than shipping features. But $204/year in recovered waste buys a lot of .com domains.