The indie ledger

Once I started building products myself, I had to pay for everything myself. What I care about more isn’t saving money, but which money is worth spending, and which only makes the product and my way of working more expensive.

Indie development costs are scattered across subscriptions, APIs, cloud services and auto-renewals, so I’ve set myself a fixed routine: once a month, review work expenses — where the money went, what it got me, and how to adjust next month.

Only while testing the AI job-search product I built did I realize that one full cycle of use could cost several dollars: one button on the page can hide a whole chain of paid calls, and failures and retries cost money too.

Controlling AI costs isn’t just shortening prompts or switching to a cheaper model. I break it into three things: which money shouldn’t be spent at all, how to bound the money that must be spent, and whether the results are still worth using once you’ve saved.