What small AI services really cost.
Price your AI app before the invoice does
Token calculators stop at the model. Your bill doesn't: there's a server, a database, email and your time. Work out the whole thing, with list prices checked on each provider's own pricing page.
Monthly bill
$26.38
$0.132 per active user
| AI modelClaude Haiku 5.5: 12,160 requests | $3.44 |
| AI modelClaude Sonnet 5.5: 3,040 requests | $16.95 |
| HostingVultr Regular Cloud Compute 1 vCPU / 1 GB | $5.00 |
| DatabaseSQLite / PocketBase / Postgres on the same server | $0.00 |
| EmailBrevo Free (300/day) | $0.00 |
| OtherDomain, monitoring, other | $1.00 |
| Total per month | $26.38 |
List prices in USD, checked 15 Oct 2026 on each provider's own pricing page. Excludes tax.
Sources
- platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing
- developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
- ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing
- claude.com/pricing
- one.google.com/about/plans
- api.vultr.com/v2/plans
- hetzner.com/cloud/regular-performance/
- digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets
- digitalocean.com/pricing/app-platform
- digitalocean.com/pricing/managed-databases
- railway.com/pricing
- brevo.com/pricing/
The ledger
Our own bills, not estimates
We run a few dozen small sites, apps and background jobs. Our hosting came to $33 last month, on servers costing $38 a month at list price. The ledger shows what runs where.
More calculators
- Subscription vs APIIs a $20 chat plan cheaper than paying per token for how you actually use it? Find the break-even.
- AI Agent Cost EstimatorWhat an agent costs per task and per month once the context grows every step and some runs retry.
- VPS vs PaaSRun your apps on one cheap VPS or on Railway and App Platform? Compare the bill with your time included.
Guides
- A $0 double opt-in newsletter with PocketBase and BrevoHow our sites run newsletter sign-ups for $0 a month: a PocketBase hook for double opt-in, Brevo's free tier for sending, and the details that keep it out of spam.
- Prompt caching: the maths, with current pricesA worked example of what prompt caching saves on Claude, GPT and Gemini at October 2026 list prices, when it pays off, and what it doesn't touch.
- Six sites and a database on one $5 VPSHow we run six content sites, their forms database and our analytics on one 1 GB, $5 a month server: the setup, measured memory and CPU, and its limits.
Rather not build it yourself?
We build small AI tools and run them on the same cheap stack these numbers come from. You get the monthly running cost before anything is built.