My Automation Stack Costs $31/Month — Here's Every Line Item

Every month I open my credit card statement and there's always one moment where I stop and ask: "Am I still getting value from this?" I decided to answer that question properly, in public. Here is every dollar I spend to keep my AI automation stack running — line by line.

The total, upfront

$31/month. Exactly $30.67, but let’s call it $31.

That’s ~$368 annualized. About the same as two streaming subscriptions nobody in the household actually uses. Here’s where it goes.

Claude API — ~$20/month (variable)

The biggest line item, and the only variable one.

I run mostly on Sonnet 3.5. The tasks are text-heavy — classification, reformatting, generating structured output from messy input — so the token counts per call are moderate but the call volume is high. Some months it’s $14. One month it hit $26. The rolling average lands around $20.

Is that justified? My honest answer: I’m buying back time I’d otherwise spend writing parsers and handling edge cases by hand. Whether that time is worth $20/month depends on the month. Some months yes. Some months I’m not sure.

The API line item is the biggest because it's the most used — and it's the most used because there's still no real substitute for what it does well.

Self-hosted n8n server — $6/month

A Hetzner shared VPS. 2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM. n8n runs in Docker on top of it and handles all my workflow automation.

The managed n8n cloud plan starts at ~$20-50/month with workflow count limits. Self-hosting means I pay just the server cost. The tradeoff: when the server goes down, I fix it. That’s happened twice at ungodly hours. I’m still calculating whether the $14 monthly savings is worth the on-call risk.

So far: yes, barely.

Cloudflare Pages + Workers — $0/month

All my frontends live here. Static site deployments are free, and the Workers free tier covers my lightweight API gateway needs — a few hundred thousand requests a month, well inside the limit.

Cloudflare's free tier is genuinely absurd for a solo builder. I keep waiting to hit the ceiling and haven't yet.

Domain — $1/month ($12/year)

One .dev domain, paid annually. All my mini-apps run on subdomains of it. I considered buying separate domains for each project, then remembered that I couldn’t properly run one project yet, so buying real estate for future projects was just procrastination with a billing cycle.

GitHub Pro — $4/month

Private repo management and Actions minutes. Honestly this is more “dev environment” than “automation stack,” but it’s genuinely in use so it stays on the list.

The $4 items are the most dangerous. They're small enough to ignore and old enough to be invisible.

What this doesn’t include

A few things that could’ve been on this list but aren’t currently:

• Email hosting — using a free tier
• Analytics — Google Analytics, free
• DNS — Cloudflare, free

If I added a proper email tool or monitoring dashboard, this number would jump. I’m resisting that until the automations earn enough to justify the upgrade.

Does this stack make money?

This is the part I owe you.

Right now: barely. The $31/month is the floor — the minimum this system needs to return to not be a net negative. Whether it clears that floor is the subject of the next post, where I’m publishing the actual numbers from the first 30 days of running this.

The honest answer is: I don’t know yet, and that uncertainty is kind of the point of documenting it here. If you want to see the receipts when they come in, the subscribe form is below.

Want the actual files behind this stack?

I packaged the 20 system prompts, Claude API cost calculator spreadsheet, 3 n8n workflow templates, and the server setup guide into a single download.

Get the $31 Stack Prompt Pack on Gumroad — $19

It’s the exact toolkit I use to run this blog on $31/month.