Monthly cost of $300, 240 million requests: he broke the bill down to every dollar

Pieter Levels (@levelsio) updated his bill on X. His business's monthly expenses have dropped to about $300, covering his websites and apps. The scale: 20,000 paying users, 252 million visitors per year, 2.4 billion requests, 2.4 PB of bandwidth. Add back Photo AI's GPU bill of $7,000/month and R2 storage of $800/month, and it's about $8,000/month. The original post says Photo AI is listed separately because it costs more than all the other sites combined.

He posted a chart of monthly spending over the years: $45 in 2013, $5,000 in 2016, $15,000 in 2021, $70,000 in 2024, $56,000 in 2025, $67,000 in 2026, and an estimated $8,000 in 2027. The cost curve first piled up slowly, then was cut down in one go.

This round of savings is nearly $34,000/month. The biggest chunk came from video: replacing Photo AI's old video model, routing some image tasks to Google Cloud where credits were available, and handing some tasks to Sume, which sells model usage at market rates. The GPU bill fell from $36,000/month to $7,000/month, saving $29,000/month.

The rest are typical billing blind spots. Servers were consolidated from Digital Ocean and Linode to Hetzner, saving about $3,000/month. Backblaze B2 backups had unlimited versions and lifecycle policies turned on, keeping ten years of file versions, and the bill was $1,200/month; after switching to 30-day versions, it became $26/month, roughly a 50x difference. Cloudflare R2 also got a lifecycle policy, moving to infrequent access after 90 days, dropping from $1,200/month to $800/month. Cleaning up unused Cloudflare domains saved $118/month; .io renewals have already reached $50/year. Claude also analyzed his Claude subscription and found he wasn't using anywhere near the Max 20x limit, dropping it from $200/month to $100/month.

In an earlier tweet, he replaced a batch of SaaS with services he wrote himself using AI, saving about $25,000/month: weather API, image resizing, NSFW detection, video streaming, screenshots, error monitoring, content moderation, customer support, crawlers, etc. Someone asked whether that meant maintaining 14 projects; he replied that it doesn't need maintenance, it keeps running, and he barely fixes it. Asked how he deploys it, he said everything is on a Hetzner VPS. Asked about marketing costs, he replied $0. Asked which Claude model he uses, he replied Opus 5.5, on a $100/month subscription.

In the comments, someone responded to the 2.4 PB of traffic with a photo in a yellow suit, captioned 'France reading that 2.4 Petabyte'. In another reply, someone posted a screenshot showing Photo AI wouldn't open. He explained that Photo AI is 100% blocked in Mexico because local abuse and fraud are severe.

Asked whether he still does pSEO, he said he doesn't do it deliberately, but there is a public Photo AI community gallery: https://photoai.com/community

This approach isn't mysterious: hand the bill to the model and ask, item by item, why you're still paying for it. Video models expire, backup versions pile up, domains get forgotten and not canceled, and subscription tiers end up higher than actual usage. Costs won't go down on their own unless someone digs out every subscription. Pieter also wrote his own judgment: AI finding cost savings on its own is bad for the economy in the short term, but in the long term it will squeeze out redundancy and leave money for better investments.