How Much Does It Cost to Run My SaaS Application? You Might Be Surprised

all right y'all so it's been a kind of a hot minute since I've made a video about this icon generator AI fast product that I've been working on um I haven't really worked on this product in like a while I'm kind of burned out on it and like it's making money people are buying icons but I wanted to kind of share with you how much does this cost to run right what are my profit margins how much is this making me it's been up for a couple of months now um so far we have 12 583 users that that means basically users who have created an account using Google and then they have created 26 477 icons so let's just kind of explore like what exactly does that mean how much traffic is that I'm just going to go ahead and just start talking about the numbers because I think that's really what people are interested in so how much does it cost to run this site all right so if we go to my AWS cost management go to the home page basically this thing is costing me maybe a dollar 22 a month okay it's forecasted for a dollar fifty two a month but that's how much it costs to have my next application deployed to Amazon using the SST framework and that also includes like hosting my Lambda functions it also includes hosting my S3 bucket I think I have about 10 gigabytes worth of icons that are stored on S3 so overall it's super cheap I think I'm getting charged maybe five cents a day and if I were to actually explore like where are the majority of costs coming from I think they're all coming from S3 let me go back to home real quick and all my occurring charges are happening from S3 I have about 41 gigabytes a month usage of storage so 41 gigabytes of icons that users have stored and these are the amount of requests that are hitting the S3 bucket to kind of fetch those I could probably do more optimization for like caching and stuff like that but overall it's like I don't have to put much effort at all into the site okay so this is one reason I really like Amazon like if you do it correctly you literally don't have to pay anything for your service especially since a lot of the Lambda executions are under a free tier so you don't have to pay for like lambdas okay so now let's go over to stripe okay so I have an icon generator AI um account which basically is keeping track of all of the income I'm getting from this and if I were to kind of zoom out for the entire month um but yeah I guess the month of June that's fine my gross volume is 844 and then after stripe you know takes out all of their their cut I get about 740. so 740 has been my my Revenue now let's talk about profit because you just saw it cost about a dollar fifty a month the host on Amazon but how much out of the 740 a revenue I'm getting back do I have to pay back to open AI so if I go back to open AI you'll see that in the month of June uh We've currently used 225 dollars from the open AI API key so out of that seven whatever let's go here 225 I mean I said what five 20 or something like that that's about a rough estimate I probably got that wrong but that's how much profit I've made from this icon generator site that's pretty good I mean I literally do not have to log in I literally don't go to Amazon I don't do anything with this I just let it sit here and people are slowly buying credits still and generating icons so it's pretty cool there's some stuff I want to kind of figure out about the icons because some of these icons just kind of suck like look at this one it's not that great um some of them look nice it just really depends on like how you know how experienced you are with crafting your prompts but overall that's all I want to share with you all is like how much does it cost in terms of operation costs for my icon generator AI application how much does it go to Amazon how much does it go to open EI again the domain costs like 12 a year which is something I didn't really incorporate into what I just broke down for you all so one thing I really like about Amazon is that once you deploy your stuff to Amazon you basically have logs that can live up to like years a month or whatever you want so in our case I've put specific log statements when users do something in my application for example when they generate icons I can kind of come into log insights and I can run this query to figure out how many people are generating icons over a five minute period over the past week so if I run this query I start getting a nice visualization to figure out on like what days is this application most popular how many people in every five minute bin period are they generating icons so right here for some reason this was a really popular time I don't know why maybe I posted something on social media here's another Spike or maybe someone bought a bunch of credits and just kind of like decided to generate a bunch of icons so I've been using this to kind of just get more insight as to my you know who's using my product and then also different features like making variants this is like a feature I have on my application where once you have an icon that's already generated you can go and like tell it to make another variant as you can tell over the past seven days we've had a 111 people who have tried to create variants so it's a feature that's used but it's not used too often and I don't know if I'm even summing this up correctly because I'm bidding these up by five minutes um I don't really put too much insight into like thinking about this what about the removing the background how many people actually try to remove background from icons um in the past seven days we got about 74 records so again it's another feature that I have but like not that many people are using it deleting accounts how many people are deleting accounts guys like 86 people buying credits bin generate icons generate icons what is this one yeah so I mean what I'm showing you right now is not really related to like my how much I pay in operational costs for this product but I did want to kind of share with you like this is pretty cool if you ever want to get more like insight as to like what features are useful technically I could probably remove the background removal thing and also the variants and like people would still use my app it doesn't seem like these are used that much and the amount of code I needed to add to allow people to remove backgrounds from their icons was actually quite significant so sometimes when you're building a product you have to weigh out the pros and the cons like if no one's using this feature you just added and it makes your code a lot more complex you kind of weigh it out you're like well I'm going to remove that because if only one percent of my users use it what's the point right how does it actually benefit me as a business um yeah hopefully uh that's about all if I forgot it to mention anything leave a comment and I'll try to paste more information about operational costs and stuff like that but that's about it so uh other than that have a good day happy coding feel free to join my Discord channel the link is in the description below if you ever want to talk to me directly or find a place to hang out with some other Developers later

Channel: Web Dev Cody

Views: 62,617

Keywords: web development, programming, coding, code, learn to code, tutorial, software engineering

Id: MD2_0G1iQrk

Length: 7min 3sec (423 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023