Indie costs

One thing that doesn’t get talked about enough: it costs money to be indie. It’s not a ton, but it adds up.

Most of them have a free version, and while some services are more generous than others with their free plans, generally you’ll be limited AF. Which is totally fine, all of us need to earn from our work. Anyway, quick cost recap:

• Hosting your landing pages and marketing sites? Let’s say a simple Vercel plan to host all your stuff. That’s $20 a month.

• Backend and database? Let’s say Supabase or spin a couple of droplets on DigitalOcean? Another $25 a month.

• An Apple developer account, if you happen to ship iOS apps? $99 per year. At least Google is less of a pirate, and you pay a one-time fee.

• If you’ve set yourself as a business, you need some accounting services. In my case is ~$120 per month, worth every penny, but still.

• Then there’s the usual indie hacker addiction: Domains. I have like 4 or 5 right now, each average $10-$20 a year.

• Tools (AI tools in particular). I mainly use Cursor right now, but it changes frequently depending on my needs, this is $20/month now but can go to the moon. I generally prefer to buy tools that are one-time payment, like Proxyman, Tower git client, or others.

Add it all up, and you’re looking at around $2,000 to $3,000 a year in a very barebones setup, or just under $300 a month. That’s your baseline burn rate before you even make a dollar of profit.

It’s not meant to scare anyone off. It’s just the reality check. Going indie is freedom, but it’s not free.

You can go cheaper, or way more expensive.

Now, you can trim these numbers down if you need to. You don’t have to use DigitalOcean, or Vercel’s paid tier, for example. You could host on GitHub Pages or Netlify’s free tier. Supabase also has a generous free plan if you’re within the limits. You could skip the accountant and do your taxes manually (been there, not fun, and my background is actually in taxes!), and maybe you only really need one domain.

But the tradeoff is comfort vs. cost. And some tools will save you days, weeks, and months of work. You save money, but you pay in time, mental overhead, and the occasional “why isn’t this working” spiral at 2 AM.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially early on when every dollar counts, but it’s worth being honest about the tradeoffs.

On the flip side, it’s very easy to crank those expenses way up if you’re not careful. A couple more SaaS tools here, a $50/month analytics service there, maybe a few premium domain names you swear you’ll use “eventually.” Suddenly you’re spending $300+ a month before you’ve made a dime.

I’ve been there too. My inner artist couldn’t resist trying MidJourney. I told myself it was for “creative exploration,” which it kind of was, but in reality, I used it maybe 10 times over 3 or 4 months, and paid every penny of the fee during those months.

Cool tool, but definitely not worth the subscription for me. It was a good reminder that not everything needs to be a paid monthly commitment (It’s a great tool btw, is getting almost there, note how a character is missing in the thumbnail, it couldn’t render the text properly after a few tries but close enough).

I think the sweet spot is finding the stack that makes your life easier enough without draining your runway. Pay for the tools that actually move the needle and be ruthless about the rest.

- Gabriel