03What this really costs

Let's count honestly, without lowballing.

The floor is about ten dollars a month. A cheap tier on one AI (entry plans at five to ten dollars exist now) plus a domain for a couple of dollars a year. Hosting is free to start. That is enough to build and launch a real first project.

Comfortable is twenty to thirty. A normal subscription with no anxiety about limits. This is the one I'd suggest: saving ten dollars usually ends with you hitting the ceiling at the worst possible moment and quitting.

Serious is a hundred to two hundred. That's when AI becomes your job and you're in it eight hours a day. I pay that, but I also live in it. Don't start here.

Completely free works too: Qwen, Kimi and DeepSeek have usable free tiers. Fine for learning and testing, tight for a big project. As a way to start - perfectly good, just don't make a principle out of it.

Separately: a server, if you even need one, is another four to ten dollars a month. First projects usually don't.