Subscription check: what I'm paying now, and what's coming
We're in the second half of the year, which means it's time for my subscription audit. I already cut a lot of this last year and thought I'd landed on something lean. Turns out I need to look again, because I can see what's coming before it hits me.
To be transparent: this is my full stack, professional and personal combined, no separating the two because at this point they run on the same infrastructure.
The list
iCloud + iCloud Mail ($1/month)
Claude AI Pro ($20/month)
Spacemail ($12/year)
Netflix ($12/month)
HBO ($7/month)
Disney+ ($8/month)
Spotify ($5/month)
Vercel (free tier)
Supabase (free tier, multiple accounts)
Neon Postgres (free tier)
Dropbox ($25/year)
Total: $673 a year, or $56.08 a month.
The irony
58% of that goes to entertainment. Which is dumb, because I barely watch anything anymore, aside from Chinese short dramas running in the background while I work.
I tried cancelling two streaming services last year. Didn't stick. A wave of good Korean dramas showed up, Netflix stayed for Bloodhounds Season 2, and I keep rewatching the HIGH&LOW franchise, especially with the new movie coming out. So the entertainment spend is basically a tax I pay myself for having taste.
Read also: HIGH&LOW: The New World - I Can't Wait For This
Where I got lean
Productivity is where the real cutting happened. Last year I dropped Notion Pro and killed Google Workspace and Google Mail entirely, which were quietly tripling my monthly costs.
I replaced all of it with iCloud Mail and Spacemail. That single move did more for my subscription bill than anything else on this list.
I also started tracking all of this properly instead of guessing. I use Kiroka, the subscription tracker I built, to see exactly what's running and what it costs, instead of reconstructing the list from memory every six months like I used to.
The Vercel wake-up call
Here's the more uncomfortable part that's about to change everything. I got a usage warning from Vercel: I'd hit the free tier limit. The same thing happened on one of my Supabase accounts.
The cause was bot traffic. Every blog and site I run publishes through my own dashboard, and everything routes through GitHub, Vercel, and Supabase.
In one hour, automated traffic sent over 80,000 requests to my site. Free tiers on platforms like Vercel cap how much traffic and processing they'll handle before you start paying, and that's a number normal human visitors don't come close to.
Bots crawling aggressively, hammering pages over and over, blow past that ceiling fast, and that's what happened here.
I've since put measures in place to slow that down and keep automated traffic from hitting the site at that pace.
So the free ride is ending. I'm looking at roughly $20/month on Vercel and $25/month on my main Supabase account once I move off the free tier. That takes my monthly cost from $56 to about $101.
Why I'm not worried about it
A few years ago I was spending close to $4,500 a year on software and infrastructure. Right now, even after this increase, I'm sitting around $1,200 a year. Paying $45 more a month is still a fraction of what I used to burn without thinking twice about it.
Free tiers get you far, but they were never going to last forever, and that's fine. What I've built in the last few months:
My own dashboard
My own publishing pipeline
A dozen apps, some real MVPs
...
It's worth paying real infrastructure costs for, because I am in control. I'm not hopping between five different tools anymore. Everything is mine, and everything is purposeful to me.
I'm not short on cash. I've made bad calls before, oversubscribing to things without checking if they were pulling their weight. This isn't that. This is infrastructure that will turn futureproof, or can run at scale.
Realistically, I don't expect to make money from anything I'm building for another two or three years, and I'm not counting on clients to cover these costs anytime soon either.
But I'm more confident than I've been in a while, because I've finally narrowed my focus to one thing: polishing TWO Docs and getting it in front of people. The subscription cost is just the price of doing that properly.