My software costs $583.13 a month, or $6,997.56 a year. Split up, $328.42 runs three blogs and $254.71 runs everything else I’ve built. AI is the biggest line on both halves, which is new for this year. What changes is the degree: 57% of the blog bill, and 83% of the other one. Hosting, the line I budgeted for, is 31% of the blog and 4% of the rest.
Part 4 of Claude Code for Bloggers.
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I had never added this up this way
I sat down to write this post knowing roughly what my big subscriptions cost and having no idea what the total was. So I pulled the actual invoices, one at a time, and wrote each one down.
Watching the number climb was not fun. About two thirds of the way through the list, it made me sweaty. Not because any single line shocked me, but because I’d been paying all of them separately for long enough to never see them stacked in one column.
Then I nearly published the wrong post twice. First I wrote the whole thing up as what my blogging costs, and it isn’t, because the same tools run my print-on-demand designs, my Amazon Influencer work, a thing that reads receipts and catches price drops, and about a dozen small web apps. Then I got the automation count wrong by an order of magnitude and had to redo the math underneath it.
So this is the version that survived checking.
How I divided the bill
Three rules, and I’d rather show them than ask you to take the totals on faith.
Direct costs go where they belong. My web host only exists because I have blogs, so all $98.95 of it is blog. My twelve app and product domains have nothing to do with writing, so none of that is.
Usage-based costs split by actual usage. I have 117 automations switched on. Most of them cost nothing to run, because they only move data between places. Thirty-one of them call an AI model every time they fire, and those are the ones that show up on an API bill. Ten of the thirty-one are blog work. The other twenty-one sort print-on-demand ideas, write product talking points, nag me about unfinished videos, and check whether anything I bought has dropped in price. So the Anthropic bill, the server and the server’s domain split 32% blog and 68% everything else. The OpenAI bill doesn’t get split at all, because when I finally opened the usage dashboard it turned out to be almost entirely image generation for the blogs.
The rest I estimated, and I’ll say which. My AI plan builds all of it, so I put about $40 of the $200 against blog work. Same approach for my database (Airtable) and my link tool (Geniuslink). Those four lines are judgment calls, not measurements.
| Blogs | Everything else | |
|---|---|---|
| AI subscription | $40.00 | $160.00 |
| Model APIs | $24.00 | $51.00 |
| Web hosting | $98.95 | $0 |
| Image generation | $122.31 | $0 |
| Social scheduling | $29.00 | $0 |
| Server and domains | $9.16 | $17.71 |
| Database and links | $5.00 | $21.00 |
| Cloudflare | $0 | $5.00 |
| Monthly | $328.42 | $254.71 |
| Yearly | $3,941.04 | $3,056.52 |
AI is the biggest line on both halves
This is the part I had backwards before I did the math. I assumed the blog would look like a normal blog, hosting first and everything else trailing behind it. It doesn’t. AI is 57% of the blog side and hosting is 31%.
What separates the two halves is how lopsided it gets. On the blog, AI is nearly double hosting. On everything else, AI is 83% and hosting is 4%. Same category winning both, by wildly different margins.
Search what a blog costs to run and you’ll get an answer around $30 a month for one site. Mine is $328 for three, and the gap isn’t hosting. It’s that I generate images instead of pulling stock photos, and that ten automations touch the blogs every week without me lifting a finger.
The running bill I didn’t plan for
$254.71 a month on the non-blog side, and 83% of it is AI.
Building an automation is a one-time job. Running it is a subscription you handed yourself. Twenty-one live workflows call a model every time they fire, and they keep firing whether I build anything new or not.
It maps onto something I say a lot: n8n is where my automations run, Claude Code is how they get made. The making shows up as one subscription, $200 a month, and it stays $200 whether I build one thing or fifty. The running shows up as an API bill that scales with how much I’ve already built.
That’s the part to know before your first automation. The bill starts when it goes live, not when you finish building it, and it grows every time you add another one.
Pictures cost money and I forgot to budget for them
Image generation costs me $122.31 a month. That’s $102.31 of gpt-image-2 plus about $20 of KIE credits, and it makes pictures the single biggest line on my blog half, ahead of hosting at $98.95. I had it filed in my head as roughly $20 until I actually looked at the usage dashboard.
Every cost breakdown I’ve read assumes you grab a free stock photo, so images cost nothing and never show up as a line at all. Mine get generated to match each post, three per article, across three blogs. It adds up fast.
I’m not telling you to stop making images. I’m telling you to put them in the budget, because they weren’t in mine until I went looking.
Update, same day this went live: things change so quickly in AI. Right after hitting publish I found a cheaper option for images, running Grok’s image model through KIE. If it holds up, the $122.31 line above is coming down.
The cheap part, and the free part
Hosting is the part I expected to hurt, and it’s the calmest thing I have.
- Managed hosting for all three blogs: $98.95 a month, one plan on BigScoots.
- The server my automations live on: $8.49 a month, because I prepaid $203.80 for twenty-four months on Hostinger.
- Cloudflare: $5 a month, running every web app I’ve built.
- Fifteen domains: $18.38 a month all in. Three blogs, twelve apps and products.
One thing coming that I’d rather see now than in an email: that server renews at $599.76 for twenty-four months, which works out to $24.99. Just about triple. It’s a $16.50 swing and it’s over a year away, so it’s a calendar note rather than a problem.
The free list turned out longer than I expected:
- SEO plugin: free RankMath, across three blogs, and I’ve never hit its ceiling.
- Transactional email: free tier through Resend.
- Project management: Asana free plan.
- Newsletter signup: free through Mediavine Grow.
- Design tool: cancelled Canva, and I haven’t missed it.
What I still don’t know
I’ve never tested the bottom of this. I don’t know whether a smaller AI plan would cover me now, because I moved up during a heavy build stretch and never went back to check. Same with the API lines, which I’ve watched climb without once asking what they’d look like trimmed.
Two figures in this post are approximations rather than invoice numbers, because usage billing moves month to month. The four allocation calls I flagged above are estimates too. Everything else is exact.
The split itself is a judgment, not an accounting standard. Another person would divide the same bill differently and be just as right. That’s why I showed the rules instead of only the totals, and it’s why I’m telling you I got the ratio wrong on the first pass and had to go back and redo it.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to run a blog with AI?
Mine costs $328.42 a month for three blogs, or $3,941.04 a year. AI is 57% of that and hosting is 31%. One blog on a basic host, using stock images instead of generated ones and without automations running against it, would land well below this.
What is the biggest cost in a creator software stack?
AI, on both halves of my bill. Across the full $583.13 it comes to $397.31. Even on the blog side alone, where I expected hosting to lead, AI comes out ahead at 57% against 31%.
Do you need a paid AI plan to run a blog?
No. Plenty of my stack costs nothing, including my SEO plugin, my newsletter signup and my project management. A paid plan starts mattering when you’re building your own tools rather than writing posts, which is a different job with a different bill.
Do AI-generated images cost money?
Yes, and it’s the line most breakdowns leave out. Mine runs $122.31 a month, which is more than I pay for hosting. Image generation bills by usage, so three images per post across three blogs turns into a real monthly number. Decide between generated and stock with that in front of you.
What does self-hosting an automation server cost?
I prepaid $203.80 for twenty-four months, which is $8.49 a month, and it renews at $599.76 for the next twenty-four, or $24.99 a month. Introductory server pricing is common, so check the renewal figure and not the sign-up figure before you commit.
Try it yourself
Open your statement, filter to the last full month, and write down every line that belongs to any project of yours. Then sort each one into three piles: only for the blog, only for something else, and shared.
The shared pile is where it gets interesting, because that’s the stuff you bought once and started using for everything without deciding to. Splitting mine is what showed me my AI spend had become the biggest thing I pay for on both sides, while I was still thinking of hosting as the real cost.
If you want to run the numbers on the server side of this, I broke down whether self-hosting your automations makes sense and built a cost calculator for it.
Your personal subscriptions deserve the same look. I broke down how to audit your subscriptions in 10 minutes, with a keep, audit, cancel pile, over on Seeding Serendipity.
A tool I built
Subscription Graveyard
Bury the subscriptions you’ve cancelled, give each one a tombstone, and watch what you’re saving pile up.
Bury your first one →I run an affiliate program on the tools I build. Approved affiliates earn 20% on what their referrals pay, for up to a year. US only for now. See the program →
Related reading
- Should You Self-Host n8n? Run the Math First
- Before You Build Another n8n Workflow, Check the ROI
- What a Claude Code Skill Is, and How to Make One
- Claude Code Skill for Writing: Stop Pasting Your Style Guide
That’s Part 4 of Claude Code for Bloggers. Subscribe if you want the rest, and go split your own bill before something renews and does it for you.
