levelsio says his business now runs on about $300 a month

levelsio says his total business expenses are down to roughly $300 a month. That covers, per year, 20,000 paying customers, 252 million visitors, 2.4 billion requests and 2.4 petabytes of bandwidth.

@levelsio

@levelsio

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Claude also analyzed my Claude subscription (yes!) and discovered I don't even use the Max 20x plan limits, so I downgraded from $200/mo to $100/mo

@levelsio

@levelsio

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Costs slowly creep up over the years and you don't realize all the things you're spending on

Photo AI sits outside that number. Add its $7,000 a month GPU bill and $800 a month of R2 storage and the real figure is about $8,000 a month. levelsio excludes it because one project dwarfs every other site put together. Even counting it, he says costs are down 90% from last year, close to what he spent a decade ago when he started.

What the agent actually found

The line item doing most of the work is the GPU bill. He says switching Photo AI to better and cheaper video models, routing some image jobs to Google Cloud where he had credits, and routing others to Sume took that bill from $36,000 a month to $7,000. Video had been expensive and stayed expensive because he never revisited it.

The rest is the sort of thing nobody gets around to. Consolidating servers onto Hetzner and cancelling Digital Ocean and Linode, about $3,000 a month. Backblaze B2 backups had infinite versioning, more than a decade of file versions for every server, and capping the lifecycle policy at 30 days took that bill from $1,200 a month to $26. Lifecycle policies on the Cloudflare R2 bucket moved photos older than 90 days into Infrequent Access, another $400. Unused Cloudflare domains, $118, with .io renewals now at $50 a year.

And then the self referential one. Claude read his Claude subscription and worked out he was not hitting the Max 20x limits, so he dropped from $200 a month to $100.

The read

This is one founder's own accounting, not audited, and it follows an earlier round where he says he replaced a stack of SaaS tools with vibe coded versions for about $25,000 a month in savings. What is new is the method. Cost audits were always the chore that lost to shipping, and a model pointed at your invoices is tireless in exactly the way a founder is not. levelsio's own caveat is worth keeping: good for him, less obviously good for everyone selling him those line items.