Everyone talks about "building with AI" as if it's free. It's not. Here are the real numbers from MAI Team's first year.
Fixed monthly costs
Vercel Pro: €20/month. Neon PostgreSQL: €0 (free tier). Domain: €14/year. Groq API: €0 (free tier). Total: ~€21/month.
Variable costs (per active user)
Groq (Llama 3.3 70B): ~€0.001 per message. OpenAI GPT-4o (premium): ~€0.03 per message. With 100 free users: ~€3/month in API costs.
The hidden cost: time
6 months full-time at €30/hour = €28,800 in opportunity cost. That's the number nobody tells you about "side projects".