Anthropic charges $20 a month for the entry-level Claude plan.
Two hundred for the Max tier. If you’re prototyping a SaaS idea, those numbers feel like a bargain. They’re how the conversation usually starts: I’ll just spin something up, the AI plan’s twenty bucks, what could it cost?
What it costs is your $20 plan, then your $200 plan, then API credits the moment you outgrow either, then hosting, then a database, then storage – and then the moment you push actual usage through it, contemporáneo money. Actual money. The kind that compounds.
We just spent $45,000 in just the first two months building an internal platform. That’s API usage, database hosting, server compute.
Not human salaries – those are separate.
That’s the infrastructure bill for two months of building one platform.
We’re an agency with the team and the budget to absorb that. Most “I’ll spin it up on weekends” projects don’t have a $45,000 ceiling.
They have $1,000 – which gets burned through somewhere around the 50% mark, right when the project starts to feel actual but isn’t shippable yet.
And then it dies.
Quietly.
In a folder called /old/projects/that-one-thing.