Building FoxyInvoice — Chapter 8: Unit economics — what it actually costs
This series is written in the open, from a real production system. This chapter is the cost sheet most build-in-public series skip — real numbers, including the honest ones. [All chapters and diagrams live in the public repo.] This is the chapter most build-in-public series skip, which is exactly why it's here. The numbers below are the real cost structure of running FoxyInvoice at its current…
FoxyInvoice's cost structure at its current scale is minimal, with the machine itself costing about $15 per month, similar to a takeaway dinner. The main expenses include a small VPS instance (~$8-15 monthly), domain registration (~$1 annually), email services (free initially, $0.10 per 1,000 emails after), object storage for PDFs and attachments (~$0-2), and backup storage (~$0-1).
Additional costs include CI/CD (free), monitoring and logging (free), and access logs and error console (in-app, free). No managed database or paid observability stack is used, as the backing of nightly backups and volume-backed containers is sufficient for a one-person team. Marginal costs for free users are effectively zero, as a signup incurs only a few database rows, a welcome email (~$0.0001), and a small amount of storage for generated PDFs.
The paid side charges Stripe a 2.9% + $0.30 processing fee per transaction for payments and a negligible $8.40/month net profit per Pro subscription after processing. With just two Pro subscribers, the entire infrastructure is covered, while one thousand Pro subscribers would result in a net income of approximately $8,400 per month.
Founding codes grant six months of free Pro access, deferring revenue that may not have existed and providing valuable feedback and word-of-mouth. Marketing costs are currently $0, with the template gallery, this series, and user feedback serving as the primary marketing efforts. The real cost of running FoxyInvoice lies in the developer's time, which is not monetized but essential to the business.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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