https://t.co/YgA6bvWMRB I’m disclosing all revenue and operational costs for my SNS with 50,000 users [Personal Development / Claude Code] Programming Tutorial #AISummary Publishing Real Operational Costs and Revenue of a 50,000-User SNS 🔳 Disclosing Financials After Reaching 50,000 Users Following the milestone of surpassing 50,000 users, the actual revenue, infrastructure costs, and unexpected expenses for “Nuuiyori,” a niche SNS for plushie enthusiasts, have been publicly shared. 🔳 Revenue Sources: Support Plans and Tips Primary revenue comes from a ¥300/month Support Plan and user-generated tips. The Support Plan offers additional themes and other perks. The design intentionally avoids monetizing core features, instead relying on users who wish to financially support the service. 🔳 Monthly Operational Cost: ~¥92,000 Normal infrastructure costs amount to approximately ¥92,000 per month. After deducting net income from the app, there’s a modest profit of around ¥10,000. However, during months with sudden user spikes, costs rise and the service may operate at a loss. 🔳 Including AI Costs Results in Overall Loss In addition to infrastructure, AI-related expenses such as the $200/month Claude Code plan have been incurred. When these are included, the service operates at an overall deficit. As a solo developer, all costs are personally funded. 🔳 Deliberate Strategy to Limit Revenue Imposing paywalls on core functions like posting or browsing would hinder user growth and content creation. Therefore, the current strategy prioritizes free access to build network effects first, with future monetization planned through ads, premium tiers, or other models. 🔳 Highest Cost: Convex The database Convex is used to store profiles, posts, comments, likes, and follow relationships. It was selected for its strong real-time synchronization capabilities and compatibility with SNS use cases, as well as its security features. 🔳 Convex Costs Skyrocketed to $1,053 Due to Viral Growth Convex costs surged from $123 in July to $1,053 in August. This was due to a sudden influx of 30,000–40,000 users within a short period, combined with implementation issues that caused excessive data fetching. 🔳 Cost Reduction Through Optimized Data Retrieval By resolving issues like the N+1 problem and redesigning the system to avoid unnecessary data loading, costs were reduced to approximately $389 in September. Currently, the SNS serving 30,000–40,000 users monthly is maintained at a cost of ¥70,000–80,000. 🔳 Improving Unit Economics Before Scaling Is Essential As user numbers grow to 100,000 or 200,000, usage-based costs will rise accordingly. Expanding scale without monetization will deepen losses. After achieving PMF (Product-Market Fit), improving revenue and cost per user becomes critical. 🔳 Android Launch Expected to Drive Further User Growth At the time of recording, the Android version was released and recorded 157,000 impressions and 1,980 reposts within just three hours. Anticipating further user growth, future monetization options under consideration include ads, paid plans, and e-commerce. 🔳 Expo OTA Delivery Incurred Unexpected Costs Expo’s OTA (Over-the-Air) feature allows updates to be deployed without app store review. After the viral surge, numerous hotfixes were pushed via OTA, resulting in an unexpected cost of ~$280. 🔳 OTA Offers Significant Advantages for Rapid Fixes OTA enables quick bug fixes and minor updates without waiting for app store reviews—its benefits outweigh the cost. However, major updates requiring new native libraries still require traditional builds and app store reviews. 🔳 Cloudflare R2 Drastically Reduced Image Storage Costs Image storage uses Cloudflare R2. Despite handling approximately 310,000 posts and an estimated 500,000 images, monthly storage and delivery costs remain under $20 under normal conditions. 🔳 Unexpected $200+ Cost from Image Conversion In September, Cloudflare’s image optimization feature was used to reduce image file sizes—but due to insufficient understanding of pricing, costs exceeded $200. It was later determined this processing was unnecessary; the plan is now to manage caching and other alternatives instead. ListItemIcon User authentication uses Clerk. From July to September, monthly costs averaged ~$25. Although Clerk’s free tier supports up to 50,000 MAUs, session durations were too short on the free plan—hence the paid tier was chosen. ListItemIcon Authentication Services Offer Strong Security Benefits Building authentication internally requires managing sensitive user data like email addresses securely—an enormous responsibility. Outsourcing to third-party services like Clerk provides significant advantages. Depending on app requirements, other authentication services should also be evaluated. ListItemIcon No Absolute “Best” Choice for Services Databases, authentication systems, and storage solutions each have unique pricing models and features; the optimal combination varies by application. Only through actual operation do you uncover cost implications and design challenges during user growth. ListItemIcon Practical Operation Builds Development ExpertiseIt was emphasized that the strength of excellent engineers lies not only in their knowledge but also in the experience accumulated through repeated cycles of development, operation, failure, and improvement. As practical experience grows, engineers become better able to make technology choices that anticipate future costs and challenges. 🔳 Focus on improving monetization going forward While the service has been maintained at a low monthly price of 300 yen without advertisements to preserve its world view, it was recognized that securing revenue is essential to sustain the service and develop new features. It was concluded that sustainable monetization is necessary for the benefit of users. 🔳 Next goal: 100,000 users The current user base of approximately 53,000 is set to grow first to 100,000. With about 10% of users coming from Taiwan, the plan includes expanding multilingual support while actively pursuing international user acquisition. 🔳 Ultimately aiming for global expansion While establishing a strong brand as a domestic-focused plushie-focused social network, the long-term goal is to grow to 200,000, 300,000, 500,000, and eventually 1 million users. The aim is to balance innovation in new features with effective monetization to create a globally successful product originating from Japan.