I recently built and scaled an app that

made $5,000 in a single month. But of

that $5,000 in a month, how profitable

is that app actually? In this video, I'm

going to break down every single cost

associated with my app so that you can

get a really clear picture of the

financials and the unit economics about

how my app that makes 5 grand every

single month works out. I feel like

these days, if you're anywhere in like

the tech entrepreneurship space, you see

people talking about, oh my god, 30

grand a month, I make 50 grand a month,

80 grand a month. But nobody ever really

reveals the profit that they actually

make per month. So I'm going to give you

one singular data point with my small

app that makes five grand in a single

month. And then after that, I'm also

going to talk about just some other

associated other hidden costs that some

people might not really know about in

the SAS and builder space. So let's get

into it. And the first thing that I'm

going to do is I know people are going

to watch the video. They're going to be

like, "Bro, you're lying. You don't

actually have an app that makes 5 grand

a month. Show us the proof, bro." I'm

going to show you just exactly the proof

to make sure that you don't doubt me.

And I'm not lying to you cuz why would I

lie to random people on the internet? I

promise I have better things to do with

my life than lie to random strangers on

the internet. All right, so here is the

proof that you guys want that I actually

do make an app that makes $4 to $5,000 a

month. So right now, if you see this is

my Stripe dashboard for my app. I'll

show you later. It's called Yorby.

Currently, it's hovering in the past

four weeks roughly $5,500 of gross

volume. And then if I actually change it

just for the month of January itself,

you will see that even in the month of

January, we closed out around making

$4,400 uh in that month right there. And

the app that I'm building, for those of

you that aren't familiar with it, it's

called Yorby, and it's essentially a

social media marketing tool that helps

businesses, creators create more viral

content on the internet to market and

advertise their business and grow their

accounts. And the way that we help

businesses and other people market and

grow on social media is by allowing

people to upload any piece of social

media content that they like. Maybe it's

a competitor or just a really viral

piece of content. And then we can

actually remix that piece of content to

fit their niche, their audience, their

brand better while still maintaining

that original viral format. So

essentially, here's a little sample.

This is a video that I created on my

Instagram. I said, "Let's recreate this

video for a fictional app that I

created." answers a couple clarifying

questions and then at the very end it

spits out a really high-converting viral

optimized script. And we have a lot of

really exciting plans coming up in the

future just building tools to help

businesses grow and market their

business on social media. But that is

the main feature that we have primarily

grown within the past 2 months or so.

And once again, Stripe proof that we

actually made that much money. So, I

just talked about how I actually think

that like optimizing for a delight or a

good design, good user experience is a

pretty valid moat in this day and age of

software and this is an example of how I

integrated that into my own app Yori.

So, when a user onboards onto Yorbi,

they actually enter in the URL of the

website that they are a part of like

their team essentially. And then what

happens there is we then fetch the

website and develop an entire initial

default prompt for them. So, for

example, right here, my your B prompt.

Uh, this is like a pre-created prompt

that we automatically created with AI as

a user goes throughout the onboarding

process so that when the user goes to

the content remixing tool here, they

come across this and they're like, "Wo,

this this prompt already exists." Like,

that's that's awesome. It makes the

onboarding onto the process and to get

their first remixing instance completed

so much faster. It just makes it feel

like a really delightful because it's a

much more personalized experience

because we were able to fetch all this

information about a user's website,

create an initial system prompt to

perform any content remixes without them

even knowing. And the way that we did

that in code is actually really simple.

We just use this API uh fire crawl. And

what we do here is we get we have a

prompt uh specifically designed to

fetching these insights from a specific

website. And fire crawl is this API tool

that will actually fetch any website and

turn it into LLM ready data. So that's

what we do. We hit the API endpoint. We

pass in the URL and we pass in the

prompt that we want to transform it

with. And then it returns a response

with that prompt that I just showed you

right there. I'm a big fan of using them

in my product of Yori to optimize for a

more personalized experience by turning

any website into LLM ready data. And I

will also want to say thanks to them for

sponsoring today's section of the video.

I was using them before they even

reached out to me. And we all know that

in this day and age, the biggest

downside of using LLMs is the fact that

they have pretty outdated data. They

have a training date cut off. So you

don't always have the most up-to-date

information. But Firecrawl actually

helps you fix that by letting their AI

agent browse, crawl the web, fetch all

the insights, and generate everything

for you into LLM ready data so that you

can give the most up-to-date results and

up-to-date knowledge for any LLM query

that you have to give to your user. And

for me, building a B2B SAS, it's been

super useful by adding more

personalization into the app as well.

Because like I said, with AI becoming

making everything more robotic, making

things feel more personal and just more

delightful like in that experience I

just showed you within Yorbi right here.

I think it's one of the best ways to

differentiate with all the robotic like

kind of soulless software out there. So

once again, thank you to Fire Call for

sponsoring the video. It's a great tool.

Highly recommend them and you can try it

out yourself by using this URL right

here. Now, let's talk about the costs

that are associated with it. So, I'm

going to try my best to be as accurate

as possible. You know, let's just use

the month of January for example. We'll

say we're at $4,500 of revenue. So, cost

number one that comes up is the LLM cost

because, as you can see, this is an AI

based tool. We run a credit based

system. We use a lot of LLMs in the

background specifically to run this

content remixing tool and other features

in our app as well. So then in the past

four weeks, in the past 30 days, we have

spent $1,300 on LLM costs. That's a lot

of money. So let's let's let's keep

running tabs on this. Okay. All right.

So for the revenue number, I know in the

month of January, we made around $4,500.

And then in the past four weeks, we're

at around $5,500. But just to keep

things simple, let's make it $5,000.

Right. So now LLM costs. We spent $1375.

Then let's see what else the next costs

that are coming up. Well, let's talk

about Superbase. I run my app on

Superbase. I have a Nex.js app that's

hosted on Versel that uses Superbase for

authentication, storage, database, all

that good stuff. We go over to

Superbase, you will see just based off

of the historical invoices, the most

recent one is $220. Although this coming

month is going to be extra expensive. I

actually ended up having to purchase a

read replica within Superbase and that

basically doubled the cost. So that's me

$400. But let's try our best to use the

month of January cost as much as

possible. So for the month of January,

our total invoice was $220. So let's

write that down. Superbase 220. So the

next big cost that I want to talk about

now is our email marketing software. I'm

going to say this right now. I think

email marketing software is disgustingly

expensive for what it is. Or maybe I'm

just too much of like a simple that I

don't understand the complexities that

are associated with it. But god damn,

this stuff is expensive. So Rescent is

the email provider that we use. Do I

love it? No. Do I hate it? No. It's

email. It kind of just exists. But the

way that the pricing works, there are

essentially two types of emails that you

can create within most of the major

email providers. transactional emails

and marketing emails. Transactional

emails are just like alerts like hey XYZ

process completed. Marketing emails are

like marketing emails. So transactional

emails you get charged usually based off

of how many emails that you send.

Marketing emails it's really popular

these days where people charge based off

of how many contacts that you are having

in your list and you can send unlimited

emails to them. So as of right now our

app has almost 20,000 people signed up.

Now do we send them emails all the time?

So so we'll send maybe one or two emails

to all 20,000 users. So, we'll send

maybe 40,000 emails or so. Sometimes

more, sometimes less. It really depends

on the season. But our resend bill, $270

a month. Oh my god. So, the big chunk of

this comes from the marketing emails

because the way that the marketing

emails pricing works is they price based

off of how many contacts you're

managing. So, even though I don't send

that many emails to these people, and

I'm just mostly keeping them there and

send maybe one, two, maybe three emails

a month to all 20,000 people or so, I

have to pay $250 a month to manage up to

50,000 contacts. That is crazy expensive

for what I think is a relatively low

usage product. But at the same time, I

do need to collect the customers and I

do send emails. Uh, and I could

theoretically send all the emails with

the transactional emails, but then users

aren't able to unsubscribe from

transactional emails, and that's kind of

shitty. And I also think potentially not

compliant either. So, alas, my hands are

tied. And I pay $250 a month to manage

50,000 contacts for email marketing that

I use kind of sparingly. That's pretty

pricey. Okay, next up, we're going to go

into actual pure Post Hog usage. So, for

those of you that aren't familiar, Post

Hog is like a product analytics tool,

product OS tool. Basically, it's like a

one-stop shop for any tool you need to

manage and create products like session

replay, web analytics, product

analytics, event tracking, error

tracking, all that good stuff. And we

use it like crazy within our app for

tracking users, feature flags,

experiments, AI analytics, as you saw in

this dashboard right here. And we use it

quite a lot, but I am pretty surprised

that the bill is not that high. It's

only 33 bucks so far. So, projected

total is 60 bucks a month. Not that bad.

So, let let's keep track of all this as

well. So, resend, what is it? 270 Post

Hog what? 60 bucks. Okay, so that's what

we got for now. Let's let's keep going,

shall we? Let's keep going. So, next up,

our Slack bill. So, with Slack, we are

currently paying, let's see, anywhere

from 70 to dollarund. Oh, what the heck?

We spent 140 on last month. What the

hell? Okay, I guess the most recent

month, uh, it dropped down to 70. So,

let's talk about Slack. So, Slack, we

don't actually have any employees. So,

for the startup that we're building,

Yorby, we don't have any employees.

myself who's a main builder, technical

founder, and then my co-founder who

handles most of the business and

marketing side and growth side of

things. So, it's really just the two of

us. And for the longest time, we did not

have Slack. We just used iMessage. And

honestly, to this day, we still

primarily communicate through iMessage.

But the reason why we pay for Slack is

mostly just because all the Slack

integrations that comes with it. For

example, like we have the Century

integrations, we have Post Talk

integrations sending alerts and eventing

into like a monitoring channel or into

like our Yorb app notifications, Yorb

payment notifications. That doesn't seem

good. Whoopsies. AI API call error. So,

essentially what we're really paying for

Slack for is just all the Slack apps

that you can plug in and integrate as

part of our dev stack, our tech stack.

Use a lot of plugins to alert us

directly within Slack because we do kind

of live on Slack. So, because we're

always on Slack, we get the latest and

greatest notifications for whatever is

happening within our app. Uh, and we are

slowly growing out the team a little bit

more. Uh, and that is primarily based

off of like some freelancers and

contractors that we're working with.

Primarily like one freelance developer

and then also a couple like freelance

marketers and creators to help us market

our app on social media. But that is

what we use Slack for. Uh, even though

primarily there's only two official

employees. So, it's two employees and a

couple freelancers. So, that's what

comes out to $70 a month. And I think

that's why the pricing has actually

changed a lot over the the days and like

the months because we're just like kind

of cycling through various freelancers

that we do continue working with or not.

But that's the cost of Slack. So let's

write that down. Let's say I don't know

70 bucks a month. Yeah, we already wrote

that down. Okay. Next cost is Verscell.

Verscell is our hosting provider that we

use to host our NextJS application. And

they are kind of notorious for being

expensive as especially as you

scale. Uh and it's kind of sort of true.

I don't know. We spend like 140 150

bucks. I think this is because in the

month of January where we really really

scaled and grew a lot. Um this come out

to be relatively expensive. Let's just

do like 150 is the total that we can

say. So Verscell is 150 a month. So I

know Versell is expensive and do I

eventually in my dream state I would

love to migrate off of Nex.js and off of

Versel to using like Tanstack start

hosted on Cloudflare which is

significantly cheaper but right now the

juice is just not worth the squeeze. The

ROI is just not quite there yet. So

we're going to stay on Next.js JS and

stay on versell for the foreseeable

future. No immediate plans to switch

off. Lastly, as our platform that we use

to scrape a lot of our data, which is

called Ampify. Now, just like a quick

reminder, as you know, within our

content remixing feature, users can

upload videos from social media like Tik

Tok or Instagram that we scrape. And

then once you scrape, we do some

processing on it to help you remix that

piece of content into whatever brand,

niche, audience that fit your business

best. So the scraping stuff that we do

here, it's all done via Apify. And we

pay so much for Appify. If you look at

this, just for the month of January,

what is it? We paid 40 bucks plus 200

plus 200 plus 240. So almost $500 a

month. It hurts. It hurts. App. So that

is a really really expensive cost just

cuz scraping is really hard handling

proxy rotation, capture, bot detection.

And we also do a lot of scraping as well

because we have a lot of users that use

our app. Champagne problems, stick too

rich, lobster too buttery. But because

we have a lot of users using the content

remixing tool and other various tools

and uh features within our app that lets

users scrape data, it's expensive and it

adds up a lot. So that is why we are

spending 500 bucks a month on ampify

cost. So those are the immediate costs

right now. But I also know there's a

couple other costs. So, I pay for Claude

Code, the $200 a month plan. I also am

going to I hadn't started yet, but I'm

thinking of like paying for OpenAI

codeex. Right now, I'm just on their $20

a month plan. And at the time, right

now, there's a promotion running where

they're giving you 2x usage on all

tiers. And honestly, for the $20 a month

tier, I haven't run into any rate limit

issues. I've been pretty impressed with

how generous they are being. But

granted, they're probably being generous

because they know they're in second

place compared to Cloud Code, so they're

trying to get more users. But so right

now I'm only paying for the $20 a month

plan. But even worst case scenario for

some later calculations, let's assume I

am willing to pay up to $200 a month.

Similar to Claude Code. And then for

cursor, I actually don't pay for cursor

because for full disclosure, because I

have an audience on the internet, I get

cursor covered by the cursor team. It

doesn't influence me any which way

whether I what I say about cursor

because I've said good and plenty of bad

things about it. I'm not obsessed with

the tool. It's not even my primary AI

code editor, AI agentic coding workflow

tool at these days. But they still cover

it. I don't pay for it, but I if I were

to pay for it, I would only pay for the

$20 a month plan because I do all of my

actual agentic coding and changes in

cloud code and chat GPT. So that's a

running total of I think most of the

services that I pay for to run my SAS

tool. So let's add this all up. So 1375

220 plus 270 plus 60 plus So I added it

all up including a projected $200 a

month for ChachiPT Pro and right now the

total cost is $3,65

that is that's a lot. So then what

profit is two like roughly $2,000 no

public math on this channel. Okay so

roughly estimating $2,000 is what I have

left over after my revenue and I'm

subtracting all the fixed costs that are

associated with my app. But then I also

have a co-founder, right? So technically

my co-founder and I, we each only pocket

$1,000. But that that's also not true

because we actually don't pay ourselves

anything because with all the residual

$2,000, we just reinvest all this back

into growing the company. So the primary

way that we've been doing this has been

by paying freelance marketers and

content creators to help us continue to

grow and make content on social media

because the way that we've primarily

marketed and grown our business has been

through social media marketing on Tik

Tok and Instagram. So basically every

single dollar that we have left over

after all the revenue minus all the

costs, we reinvest every single penny of

this back into growing the business with

marketing expenses. So our total profit,

actual profit is $0. We make no money

from this app. So those are the

financials of the app that I'm currently

building. But I also want to talk about

some other things that many other app

builders or people that want to build

apps might not know about. So right now

I build a web app and I because of that

I use Stripe and luckily with Stripe

whenever any type of transaction or

payment happens I get that money

deposited into my bank account within

like a couple days 2 3 days max usually.

But then let's say if I were building an

iOS application or a Google Play

application for an iPhone or an Android

phone. Google and Apple for the vast

majority of mobile apps out there they

take a 30% cut of every single

transaction that occurs. They do have

like a small business program where if

your app makes less than a million

dollars a year, I believe last I

checked, they reduce that commission

from 30% down to 15%. But still,

regardless, they take a pretty hefty

chunk of any revenue that's charged

within your app. So that's why often

times you'll find app builders say that

if you purchase a subscription on the

phone, it is more expensive to account

for the cut that Google and Apple take.

Whereas, if you purchase that same

subscription on their website directly,

it's usually at a discounted price

because they don't have to account for

the middleman tax cut that Apple and

Google have in place. Another con with

building a mobile app specifically is

the fact that Apple and Google do not

pay you and deposit that money into your

bank account immediately. Apple and

Google actually pay you out like a net

20, net 30, like you have to wait at the

after the close of a month, a couple of

days for all the revenue and money from

that particular month to be deposited

into your bank account. So, let's say

you have a really viral month and you

make 50 grand that month. You don't get

that money until like another month

almost at times. So, that can cause you

to run into some potential cash flow

issues as well. Now, recently there was

a big court ruling specifically in the

US that says that the Apple and Google

must allow users an option to purchase

whatever subscription off of the app and

into like a Stripe website, a Stripe

checkout page, for example, so that

Apple and Google no longer are forced to

take that cut of revenue every single

transaction that's made on a mobile app.

But that also runs a risk of lowering

conversion rates because a user gets

navigated off of the app to a web page

back into the app. So, basically,

monetizing and growing a mobile app is

very, very hard. and a lot more

financially difficult in my opinion than

building a web app where you don't have

to pay any middleman tax and you get

paid out immediately due to Stripe. And

another thing that I want to talk about

right now is I know people are going to

be looking at this video being like, "Oh

my gosh, bro, you're overpaying for your

server and your hosting. You can host

everything on a VPS for $20 a month. Oh

my god, Superbase is so expensive. You

can self-host on a VPS for $10 a month."

And I totally acknowledge that. You're

right. My app, the whole business right

now is incredibly capital inefficient.

There are so many cost-saving measures

that we can do. Do I need chat GPT Pro

with codeex and cloud? Probably not. I'm

probably okay with one. Could I host

everything on a VPS? Yeah, I probably

could. But I'll be honest, right now we

are just not really thinking any of

that. We are experiencing a lot of

growth and all of our waking hours are

spent growing the app. We're just trying

to grow it as much as we possibly can

because we can always do cost cutting

and cost saving later. That's honestly

the easy part. The growth is the hard

part. And while we have a little bit of

momentum behind our sales, we are just

really prioritizing everything there and

not worrying too much about the

financials because once again, we can

always play around with the financials

and become more efficient and improve

the cost savings so that we can make

more money and actually pocket that

money into our pockets. But let's be

honest, at 5 grand a month of revenue,

even if we had like 60% margins or 50%

margins, we're still each only pocketing

like one to $1,000, $1,200 every single

month. And for now, that's just not what

quite worth it. So luckily we have the

luxury of doing that where we can just

continue to be focused on growth and not

everybody does have that luxury but

luckily we do. But that's all I got to

say. Building apps is hard man. It

is not easy. It is a grind. And it's one

of those things that in an ideal world

yes it'll be the best business model

that can possibly exist cuz you can just

throw money to scale. You don't run into

scaling issues really compared to other

like brickandmortar or ecom businesses.

But I do think because of that it's a

lot harder for the app businesses to

take off. but when they do take off,

they are one of the best businesses to

run in the world. That's all I got for

today. Let me know if you have any

questions or comments. Leave them in the

comments down below. I'll do my best to

try to answer and respond to every

single one of those. But thank you so

much for watching. I'll see you in the

next one. Peace.