What It Costs
The whole bill, line by line, with every price read from the vendor's own page: three setups from free to Cole's own, which plans are worth paying for, and where Cole's guesses about prices were right or wrong.
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Most of this setup is free. The bill comes from two places: the AI subscriptions that run the agents, and a short list of plans paid for because a free tier stopped being enough. This page lists every line item with its price as read from the vendor’s own page on October 28, 2026, in three setups, from a first project to Cole’s own.
StudiumWhat it costs
Start from a preset, then change any line. Every price links to the page it was read on.
The services in Cole’s setup this month, as in the table below. Langfuse is self-hosted, the storage amounts are estimates, and the servers are left out on purpose.
Monthly figures include yearly prices divided by twelve. Not included: taxes, usage beyond what is listed (bandwidth, overages, metered AI), and the first-year discounts some registries offer. Read each line’s note on the vendor’s page before you buy.
The calculator starts from the same three setups as the tables below. Pick one, change the quantities (seats, domains, gigabytes, servers), switch items on or off, and it adds up a monthly and a yearly total from the same price list that every page of this wiki uses. Yearly prices are spread over twelve months, usage prices are multiplied out, and one-time purchases are kept apart from the monthly figure.
How prices work on this wiki
Every price on every page is a tag, not typed text. It prints the amount, the day it was read and a link to the page it was read on, and all of them come from one data file. When a vendor changes a price, that file changes and every page follows. A price that could not be confirmed on the vendor’s own page says unverified next to it. Agents that edit this wiki (Editing the Wiki with Agents) follow the same rule: a price is a tag or it is not on the page.
Read the unit and the billing period in each one. Several prices here hold only when paid a year at a time (Cloudflare Pro, Datadog Pro, Sentry Team, Termius Pro), some are per seat or per user, some per zone or per host, and storage is per gigabyte per month. Taxes are not included.
Just starting
Everything free except the name and one AI plan:
| Item | Choice | Price |
|---|---|---|
| A domain | One .com at Cloudflare’s registrar (Domains) | $10.46 per year |
| DNS, CDN, firewall | Cloudflare Free (Cloudflare) | Free |
| Frontend hosting | Vercel Hobby (Vercel) | Free |
| Code and CI | GitHub Free, with 2,000 minutes per month of Actions for private repositories (GitHub Actions) | Free |
| Private network | Tailscale Personal (Tailscale) | Free (up to 6 users) |
| Error monitoring | Sentry Developer (Sentry) | Free (1 user, 5k errors a month) |
| Model traces | Langfuse Cloud Hobby (Langfuse) | Free (50k units a month) |
| Infrastructure as code | OpenTofu (OpenTofu) | Free (open source, MPL-2.0) |
| An AI coding plan | Claude Pro (Claude Code) | $20 per month ($17 a month billed annually) |
The whole thing costs the AI plan plus a dollar or so a month for the domain.
Most people
What Cole means by “the free plan is probably good for most people”: someone building and shipping real projects alone, with agents doing a lot of the work.
| Item | Choice | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Domains | Two .coms | 2 × $10.46 per year |
| DNS, CDN, firewall | Cloudflare Free | Free |
| Frontend hosting | Vercel Hobby (Pro if the project makes money) | Free |
| Code and CI | GitHub Free | Free |
| Private network | Tailscale Personal | Free (up to 6 users) |
| One small server | An EC2 t3.small for agents and bots (Servers) | $15.18 per month (t3.small at $0.0208 an hour) |
| Storage | 50 GB in S3 Standard (S3 and Glacier) | 50 × $0.023 per GB per month |
| Error monitoring | Sentry Developer | Free (1 user, 5k errors a month) |
| Model traces | Langfuse Cloud Hobby | Free (50k units a month) |
| Host monitoring | Datadog’s free tier (Datadog) | Free (up to 5 hosts, 1-day metric retention) |
| App Store | Apple Developer Program, if you ship iPhone apps (App Store Connect) | $99 per year |
| An AI plan for daily agent work | Claude Max 5x | $100 per month |
The AI plan is about four fifths of the monthly total; the server is most of the rest.
Cole’s setup
The services in Cole’s setup, as of this month, free ones included:
| Item | Choice | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Frontend hosting | Vercel Pro, one developer seat | $20 per developer seat per month |
| DNS, firewall | Cloudflare Pro on the one production zone, Free on every other | $20 per month billed annually ($25 billed monthly) |
| Private network | Tailscale’s paid tier above Personal, one user | $8 per user per month |
| App Store | Apple Developer Program (TestFlight, App Store Connect) | $99 per year |
| Domains | Eight .coms, two .ai, one .org, plus about a dozen novelty endings not priced here | 8 × $10.46 per year, 2 × $80 per year, 2-year minimum ($160 up front), 1 × $11.20 per year ($8.50 the first year) |
| Claude | Max 20x, for a fleet of parallel sessions (The Agent Fleet) | $200 per month |
| ChatGPT | Pro, for Codex (three tiers; the lowest is shown) | from $100 per month ($100, $200 or $500 tiers) |
| Code and CI | GitHub Pro; private CI runs on Cole’s own machines | $4 per month |
| Storage | S3 Standard, assumed 100 GB | 100 × $0.023 per GB per month |
| Archives | Glacier Deep Archive, assumed 1 TB | 1,000 × $0.00099 per GB per month |
| Model traces | Langfuse, self-hosted: open source, no license fee (Cloud Core would be $29 per month) | none |
| Error monitoring | Sentry Team, for the Vercel and GitHub integrations | $26 per month billed annually ($29 monthly) |
| Host monitoring | Datadog’s free tier | Free (up to 5 hosts, 1-day metric retention) |
| Infrastructure as code | OpenTofu | Free (open source, MPL-2.0) |
Servers are left out of this table, because their number and size change with the work; a small one is $15.18 per month (t3.small at $0.0208 an hour) (as of , aws.amazon.com) each. The storage amounts are assumptions for the calculator, not a measurement.
The two AI plans are about three quarters of the monthly total, and everything else together costs less than the Claude plan alone. The plans that are not AI exist because a specific limit was hit: more firewall rules and real rate limits on the production zone, deployment volume and commercial use on Vercel, team features and integrations on Sentry.
Checking Cole’s numbers
Cole gave several prices from memory. Here they are next to what the vendors’ own pages say today:
| Cole said | The vendor says | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| “.ai … $100 a year maybe and you have to do 2 years” | $80 per year, 2-year minimum ($160 up front) (as of , domains.cloudflare.com) | The two-year minimum is right, and it is the registry’s rule. At cost it is cheaper than the guess; registrars with a markup charge more. |
| A domain is “anywhere from $5 to $50 … most commonly $5 to $30” | .com $10.46 per year (as of , domains.cloudflare.com), .io $50 per year ($32 the first year) (as of , domains.cloudflare.com) | Right. Most common endings cost about what a .com does. |
| “we pay for the Vercel Pro plan only because of the amount of stuff we’re building … the free plan, honestly, is probably good for most people” | Hobby Free (as of , vercel.com), Pro $20 per developer seat per month (as of , vercel.com) | Right for personal projects. Hobby is non-commercial only, and only the owner’s commits deploy on it. |
| Tailscale: “the free plan is good for most people. I think we’re paying $8 a month for the next level one … maybe the ACL rules” | Personal Free (up to 6 users) (as of , tailscale.com), Standard $8 per user per month (as of , tailscale.com) | The price matches Standard for one user. Access rules work on every plan; what Personal limits is the groups in those rules (3, against 10 on Standard) and business use, which Personal does not allow. Personal Plus, the old step between them, was retired in April 2026: $5 per month (retired plan) (as of , tailscale.com, unverified). |
| Cloudflare: “the $20/month Pro plan just so you can do more WAF rules” | $20 per month billed annually ($25 billed monthly) (as of , cloudflare.com) | Right on annual billing. Custom rules go from 5 to 20 and rate limiting rules from 1 to 2. |
| GitHub: “public repos actions are free but private pays over certain amounts of minutes” | 2,000 minutes per month (as of , docs.github.com) free on GitHub Free, then $0.006 per minute (as of , docs.github.com) for Linux, $0.062 per minute (as of , docs.github.com) for macOS | Exactly right. |
| Apple: “$99 dev fee” | $99 per year (as of , developer.apple.com) | Right, and it renews every year. |
What is worth paying for
Free tiers that are genuinely enough for one person: Cloudflare Free for nearly every domain, Tailscale Personal for personal use, Vercel Hobby for personal and non-commercial projects, GitHub Free (and free Actions on public repositories), Sentry Developer, Langfuse Hobby or self-hosted Langfuse, Datadog’s free tier for up to five hosts, and OpenTofu.
Plans to pay for when you hit the limit, not before:
- Cloudflare Pro, on the zone that takes production traffic, when five firewall rules and one ten-second rate limit are not enough, or when bot protection has to make exceptions for your own clients.
- Vercel Pro, when a project makes money, when more than one person commits, or when the deployment volume outgrows Hobby.
- Tailscale’s paid plans, for business use or for more groups in the access rules.
- Sentry Team, for more than one user or for third-party integrations.
Costs that look free and are not:
- macOS minutes in CI. Free on public repositories, about ten times a Linux minute on private ones. An automated commit that triggers macOS jobs on every push can cost more than every plan on this page; see how a CI bill runs away.
- Renewals after a first-year discount. Compare domain renewals, not first years.
- Logs. Datadog bills logs per gigabyte ingested and per million events indexed, separately from hosts.
- Requests and retrievals on S3. Storage is cheap; requests, retrievals and the Glacier minimum durations are where surprises come from.
Guardrails
A bill is easier to keep than to fix. Cole’s are all set up once and then left alone:
- AWS Budgets emails at 85% and 100% of the month’s budget and when the forecast passes 100%, and Cost Anomaly Detection flags any service whose spend jumps. Both are part of the AWS organization in OpenTofu.
- A GitHub Actions budget stops hosted jobs in private repositories when it is reached.
- Short-lived machines carry a hard instance cap and their own monthly budget (see burst capacity).
- Langfuse prices every model call, including those on flat subscriptions, at API rates, which is how Cole checks whether a plan is still worth more than it costs (see cost analysis).
Reading your own bill
The tables above are list prices. Your real numbers are in each vendor’s own usage page, and it is worth reading them once a month:
- AWS: Cost Explorer, grouped by service, shows what S3, EC2 and the rest really cost, including the requests and data transfer that list prices leave out.
- GitHub: the billing usage report breaks Actions down by repository and runner type, which is where a runaway workflow shows up first.
- Vercel: the usage tab shows how close each resource is to the plan’s included amounts.
- Cloudflare: billing lists each zone’s plan and any add-ons, so a forgotten Pro zone does not hide.
- Langfuse: its cost dashboards show what the model calls would cost at API prices, per project, model and session, which is the fair way to compare a subscription with paying per token.
The desk
Not part of the three setups, but part of the setup:
| Item | Price |
|---|---|
| Mac mini, base model | $899 (base M6 model) |
| Logitech MX Master | $119.99 (MX Master 4) |
| Apple Magic Mouse | $79 (white; black is $99) |
| Screens 5 | $29.99 per year ($4.99 monthly, $199.99 lifetime) |
| Termius Pro | $10 per month billed annually |
| Wispr Flow Pro | $15 per user per month ($12 billed annually) |
| Ghostty | Free (open source, MIT license) |
| Bitaxe | from $61 (Bitaxe Gamma 602) |
(As of October 28, 2026, from each maker’s or seller’s own page.)