How much does it cost to run an app I built with AI?

Because your app is not one thing you pay for. It is several services joined together, and each charges in its own way. One may charge by the month, another by how much you store, another per email or per sale.

Prices also change. Anything we wrote as a number here would be out of date soon and wrong for your mix of services. So this page explains what each cost line is and how to find its real number.

• Hosting: the rented computer that keeps your app online. Often included in your app builder's plan, or sold as its own service. It usually grows with visitors and how busy the app is.
• Database: where your app stores users and their data. It usually grows with how much you store and how often the app reads it.
• Domain: your own web address, such as yourapp.com. Usually a yearly fee to a domain seller. Optional at the start.
• Email sending: the emails your app sends by itself, such as sign-up confirmations and password resets. Usually charged by how many emails go out each month.
• Payment fees: if you take money, the payment service usually keeps a share of each sale, sometimes plus a small fixed fee per payment. Check the exact rate for your country.
• AI usage: if your app calls an AI service while people use it, you pay for each request. The bill grows with how much text or how many images go in and out.

A free tier is the amount of a service you can use without paying. It ends when you pass a limit, such as a number of users, emails or gigabytes stored, or when a free trial period runs out.

What happens next depends on the service. Some stop working at the limit. Others keep running and start charging, often only if you added a payment card. Read that part of each pricing page before launch, not after.

The ones that grow with every action, in our reading of common early bills:

• AI usage, because a single busy user can make many requests. If anyone can use your app without signing in, strangers can run up the bill.
• Payment fees, because they are a share of every sale, so they grow with success. Count them in your price.
• Builder plans, because some app builders charge for their own use separately from hosting the finished app.

Here is an illustrative example with made-up round numbers. Say your app makes one AI request each time a user presses a button. With 10 testers pressing it 5 times a day, that is 50 requests a day. With 1,000 users doing the same, it is 5,000 a day, a hundred times more. The cost per request did not change. Your usage did.

1. List every service your app uses. Your builder's settings or your code's setup files usually show them.
2. For each, write down its free limit, what it charges after that, and what it counts: users, storage, emails, requests or sales.
3. Estimate your usage at 10 users, 100 users and 1,000 users.
4. Set a spending alert or limit on every service that offers one.

If you plan to charge, put these costs next to your price. How much to charge helps you set a price from the value you give, then check it covers the cost of serving each customer.

With no users, the bill is likely tiny and your time is better spent finding users. That is mostly right. The missing fact is how your costs grow per user, especially AI usage. Spend one hour on the list now, so a good week does not become an expensive one.

Stack Picker suggests one set of tools you can build and run alone: one tool for each layer of your app, each with a reason. It does not give exact prices, at most a rough range, so you still check each pricing page. Which tools to build with as a non-technical founder explains the choices.

Make a one-page table of every service your app uses. For each, write the free limit, what happens when you pass it, and which email inbox gets the warning. Turn on a spending alert wherever one exists.