What does it cost to run an app I built with AI?
For a small app with paying customers, the bills you can see, hosting, database and monitoring, usually add up to $30 to $100 a month, and AI model calls add whatever your users consume, from a few dollars to several hundred. The large cost is not the servers. It is the person who keeps the app running, and that is where the range runs from $70 an hour for occasional help to $4,000 a month and up for a fractional CTO.
This page lists the real line items at current published prices, says where each one jumps, and shows three founders' actual monthly bills. Nothing here is an estimate of yours; it is the price list, so you can add up your own.
In founders’ words
“I often paid anywhere from $25-$200/mo. Other costs like API, models, etc. made monthly bills upward of $300/mo.”
“Even if the server costs $10/month, spending 2–3 engineering hours maintaining it can make the real cost completely different.”
“I feel like a couple weeks ago on average my cost per minute was 4 to 5 times what I'm seeing today and what I was seeing in the weeks prior.”
The bills you can see: hosting and database
Most apps built with Lovable, Bolt, v0 or Claude Code land on the same few services, and the list prices are public.
- Vercel: Hobby $0, Pro $20 a month. Pro includes 1 TB of data transfer; past that it is $0.15 per GB.
- Supabase: Free is $0 with a 500 MB database, and free projects pause after a week without activity. Pro is $25 a month with 8 GB, 100,000 monthly active users and 250 GB of egress, then $0.09 per GB.
- Cloudflare Workers: free for 100,000 requests a day; the paid plan is $5 a month for 10 million, with no bandwidth charge.
- A rented server: DigitalOcean from $4 to $12 a month, AWS Lightsail from $5. Cheap, and someone has to patch, back up and restart it.
- Replit: Core $20 a month, Pro $100, hosting included.
The rule for a product people pay for: be on a paid plan. Free tiers pause, stop at a limit, and give you nobody to email when they do.
The bill that moves: AI model calls
If your app calls a model, you pay per token, and this is the line that surprises founders. Current list prices per million tokens, input and output: Claude Haiku 4.5 $1 and $5, Sonnet 5.5 $2 and $10, Opus 5.5 $4 and $20. OpenAI's gpt-6.1-sol is $2 and $10, and its small gpt-6-luna is $0.10 and $0.50.
Worked out: a chat reply that sends 2,000 tokens in and gets 500 back costs about $0.009 on Sonnet 5.5 and about half that on Haiku. A thousand users having twenty exchanges a month is 20,000 replies, so roughly $90 to $180 at those sizes. That is affordable. What is not affordable is sending the whole conversation history on every turn, retrying failed calls without a limit, or an agent loop that never stops. Those are how a $90 month becomes a $900 one, and the fix is in the code, not the plan.
The lines people forget
- Payments: Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents on each successful domestic card payment. On $5,000 of monthly sales at $29 each, that is about $200.
- Error monitoring: Sentry's Developer plan is free for one user and 5,000 errors a month; Team is $26 a month. Without something like it, your customers are your monitoring.
- Your build tool: Claude Pro is $20 a month and Max starts at $100; Replit Core is $20 and Pro $100. A long fix session on the cheaper plan hits the usage cap.
- Email, text messages, maps and search each add a small bill once you have users: a September 2026 model of a 1,000-user app put email at up to $20, texts at about $12 and maps at up to $70 a month.
- A domain, an app store developer account and a backup destination are small yearly bills that are easy to let lapse.
Three real monthly bills
A September 2026 cost model for a small web app on Vercel Pro and Supabase Free came to about $21 a month at 10 users, $30 at 100 and $230 at 1,000, before AI calls and before anyone's time.
A solo developer running five AI apps posted a $171 month in May 2026: Supabase Pro $25, Claude API $8.89 after aggressive caching, Claude Max $110, Expo $19, and $0 for Vercel, Cloudflare, Fly.io and GitHub on free tiers. His own line: the infrastructure is cheap; building something people want is not.
A founder on r/vibecoding in January 2026 wrote that the build tools alone cost $25 to $200 a month, and that API and model costs pushed the bill past $300 a month.
Read across those three: the services are tens of dollars; the model calls and the build subscription are the first hundreds; the person is the thousands.
The cost no pricing page shows: the person
Agencies price maintenance at 15 to 20 percent of the original build cost per year, so a $200,000 app costs $30,000 to $40,000 a year to keep up (a July 2026 agency guide). An AI-built app has no build invoice to take a percentage of, so think in hours and in who is responsible.
By the hour: a senior US engineer on a vetted network bills $130 to $200 (A.Team, June 2026); one Lovable fix shop charges $70 an hour with a five-hour minimum. By the month: rescue shops publish $499 for monitoring and small fixes, and $3,499 for 40 hours; a fractional CTO advises for $4,000 to $10,000 a month. The cheap end buys hours. The expensive end buys judgment. Neither automatically buys someone who notices at 2 a.m., so ask that question before you ask the price.
| Line item | Typical range | Where it jumps |
|---|---|---|
| Frontend hosting | $0 to $20 (Vercel Hobby or Pro; Cloudflare Workers $5) | Data transfer past 1 TB on Vercel Pro, at $0.15 per GB |
| Database and sign-in | $0 to $25 (Supabase Free or Pro) | 8 GB of data, 100,000 monthly users, or egress past 250 GB at $0.09 per GB |
| A rented server instead | $5 to $12 (Lightsail, DigitalOcean) | Patching, backups and restarts are now your job |
| AI model calls | $0 to several hundred | Full history on every turn, unlimited retries, a loop that never stops |
| Payments | 2.9% plus 30 cents per card charge (Stripe) | Refunds and disputes |
| Error monitoring | $0 to $26 (Sentry Developer or Team) | 5,000 errors a month on the free plan |
| Your build tool | $20 to $100 and up (Claude Pro or Max, Replit Core or Pro) | A long fix session on the cheaper plan |
| The person who keeps it running | $70 an hour to $10,000 a month, by who and how much | The night it goes down and nobody is watching |
Questions
Can I stay on free tiers once people pay me?
You can, and you should not. Supabase pauses free projects after a week without activity, Vercel Hobby cannot buy more usage when a limit hits, and free plans give you nobody to contact. The paid plans are $20 to $25 a month. That is cheaper than one lost customer.
How much do AI features cost per user?
At current prices, a typical chat reply costs under a cent on a mid-size model, so a user who has twenty exchanges a month costs about $0.10 to $0.20. The cost per user only becomes a problem when the code sends too much on each call or calls more often than it should, which is a code fix, not a pricing problem.
Why was my bill suddenly ten times higher?
Almost always one of three things: a loop or retry with no limit, a prompt that grew to include the whole history, or traffic that crossed an included allowance (bandwidth, function calls, egress) into per-unit pricing. Every provider above has a spending alert or a hard cap. Turn it on before you need it.
Is Vercel plus Supabase enough, or do I need my own server?
For most apps with up to a few thousand users, the two managed services are enough and cheaper in hours than a server you maintain yourself. A rented server at $4 to $12 is cheaper in dollars and more expensive in your time, which is the point the r/SaaS post above makes.
What is the biggest monthly cost of running an app?
The person responsible for it. Services are tens of dollars, model calls and build tools are the first hundreds, and competent technical help is $70 an hour to several thousand a month. Decide who that person is before you decide which hosting plan to buy.
First look, $750. After a free call, we read your whole product and tell you what is finished, what is not, and what to do first.
Setup, $3,000 fixed. We make it ready for real customers, in accounts you own.
Partner, $2,500 a month. We review what your coding agent writes and keep the checks and tests current. Month to month.