✨ Total costs for all my non-AI sites are now at a new low of $979/mo, so finally sub $1K/mo!

And a very nice >99% profit margin

So for every $1 I make, I now take home $0.99 (pre tax)

I know the tendency in startups (especially if you're VC funded) is to splurge and spend money and hire and get a big office, but I'm trying to do the opposite for no other reason than:

"Is it possible to build a 100% automated and super lean business with >99% profits?"

And I think it is

To compare my costs a year ago before cost cutting were about 30x that

Tip if you wanna do this: enable sticky push notifications on your business banking app (in my case Wise Business) so you see EVERY SINGLE PAYMENT, then see if that payment is actually essential

Cost savings:
- Saved $2,251/mo disabling Backblaze infinite versioning and now it's $6/mo for 1TB for my server backups
- Saved $687/mo at Digital Ocean by downgrading to a $4/mo droplet and 1TB volume also for server backups
- Managed to downgrade to a lower Scrapingbee plan at $99/mo for my scraping + screenshots
- X API is now $175/mo because I paid anually, so we save $25/mo
- Cancelled a lot of SaaS and APIs I didn't use anymore, there's SO many that just charge you but you don't realize!
- Mapbox became $0 now either cause Nomads map traffic went down or their pricing changed

I investigated the Cloudflare bill and it seems very worth it, I'm on a custom Enterprise plan and I heavily use it for Image Resizing on Photo AI and Interior AI, and yes I could do that myself but in the end I think it's worth it because the ease of Cloudflare image resizing is so nice, you just type the URL of your pic and add a Cloudflare URL in front of it with width=600 and now you got a 600px wide pic

I say non-AI, because my AI sites are so much more expensive due to GPU usage, but also still reasonable: $24,000/mo, which is now 96% of my costs! Also most of the Cloudflare and DevOps bill is now Photo AI and Interior AI so that isn't counted with the non-AI sites anymore, as the other sites just run automated now

For AI sites the profit margin is 87%, still healthy

I guess my frugal 🇳🇱 Dutchness is finally coming out!