The Hidden Costs of Side Projects: What Indie Devs Actually Spend

Ask an indie developer how much their side project costs and you'll usually hear something like "just hosting, so maybe $5 a month." But when you actually add everything up, the real number is almost always 3–5x higher.

The gap between perceived cost and actual cost is one of the biggest blind spots in indie development. Let's walk through the expenses most developers forget about.

The Expenses Nobody Talks About

Domains ($10–20/year each)

Every project needs a domain. Most developers buy one and forget the exact cost. But at $12–15/year per domain, a developer running four projects is spending $50–60/year just on domain renewals. And that's assuming you're not sitting on "someday" domains you bought during a burst of inspiration.

The sneaky part: domain costs are annual, so they feel small. But they never stop. Even abandoned projects keep costing you if you forget to cancel.

SSL Certificates (Usually Free, But Not Always)

Let's Encrypt made SSL free for most setups, but some configurations — especially older ones or those using specific CDNs — still require paid certificates. If you're on a legacy setup paying $50–100/year for SSL, that's worth revisiting.

Hosting ($0–50+/month per project)

Free tiers are generous these days, but they have limits. Vercel's free tier works great until your project gets traffic and you need more bandwidth or serverless function invocations. Railway's free tier has a $5 cap. DigitalOcean starts at $4/month for the most basic droplet.

The real cost creep happens when you have multiple projects on paid tiers. Five projects at $7/month each is $35/month — $420/year — just for hosting.

CI/CD Minutes

GitHub Actions gives you 2,000 free minutes per month on the free plan. That sounds like a lot until you have a test suite that takes 8 minutes and you push 10 times a day across multiple repos. CircleCI, Travis CI, and other providers have similar tiers that can catch you off guard.

Monitoring and Uptime

Uptime monitoring (Pingdom, UptimeRobot, Better Stack), error tracking (Sentry, LogRocket), and log aggregation (Datadog, Papertrail) all have free tiers that work for one or two projects. Scale to four or five projects and you'll hit limits fast.

Sentry's free tier allows 5,000 events per month. One buggy deploy can eat that in a day.

API Costs

This is where expenses get truly unpredictable. If your project uses OpenAI, Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid, or any pay-per-use API, your monthly cost fluctuates with usage.

The dangerous pattern: you build with an API during development when usage is near zero. You launch, usage grows, and suddenly you have a $30 API bill you didn't budget for. Multiply this across multiple APIs and multiple projects and it adds up fast.

Email Services

Transactional email (SendGrid, Postmark, Resend) and marketing email (ConvertKit, Mailchimp) have free tiers, but they're limited. Once you need to send more than a few hundred emails per month, you're paying $10–25/month per service.

Analytics

Google Analytics is free but increasingly annoying with consent requirements. Privacy-focused alternatives like Plausible ($9/month), Fathom ($14/month), or PostHog (free tier with limits) are popular but add to the monthly burn.

Development Tools

IDEs, code quality tools, design tools — many developers don't count these because they're "general" expenses. But if you're paying $10/month for a JetBrains license, $12/month for Figma, and $10/month for a GitHub Copilot subscription, that's $32/month in tooling overhead that should be factored into your project economics.

How It All Adds Up

Let's look at a realistic scenario. You're an indie dev running two active projects:

And this is for just two projects with modest usage. Add a third project, upgrade a database tier, or hit an API usage spike and you're easily over $150/month.

Why Per-Project Tracking Matters

The reason generic expense tracking doesn't work for developers is that we need to know the cost per project, not just the total spend.

If Project A generates $300/month in revenue and costs $80/month to run, that's great — $220 profit. But if Project B generates $50/month and costs $70/month, you're losing $20/month on it. Without per-project tracking, you'd see a combined $350 revenue and $150 costs and think everything is fine. But one project is subsidizing the other.

Per-project expense tracking lets you make informed decisions: double down on what's profitable, optimize or shut down what isn't.

Start Tracking Today

If reading this made you uncomfortable because you don't know your actual per-project costs, you're not alone. Most indie devs don't. But fixing it takes five minutes.

Open Dev Expense Tracker and add your expenses project by project. It's free, runs in your browser, and gives you the per-project breakdown you've been ignoring. No signup, no credit card, no excuses.