Founder math · turn the knobs

What it takes to clear $3,000 a month

Take-home is a subtraction: subscription price, minus the platform's cut, minus the model cost per player, times enough players. The one that swings everything is model cost per player — so start there.

Try a scenario:

Avg price / playerblended across Solo · Couple · Family, per month$12

Model cost / playerthe frontier-model spend per player, per month — the big lever$3.00

Platform cutstore fee on each subscription

Fixed costs / monthserver, tools, the odd bill$150

Free → paid conversionshare of active players who subscribe3%

Your target take-homepre-tax draw to yourself$3,000

You need

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The straight read

Model cost per player is the whole game. At ~$1–3/player you clear $3k with a few hundred subscribers. Push it past your price and no number of players saves you — you'd pay to acquire each one. That's why the running build uses a small local model and why "hosted backend" is the real ship blocker: it decides your margin before marketing ever matters.

Two ways to hold the cost down: self-host an efficient model (fixed GPU cost, scales with concurrency, not headcount), or meter API use fairly (ordinary play is cheap; cap the pathological). Either keeps you in the green band.

The other wall is reach. Subscribers = active players × conversion. At 3% conversion, a few hundred subs means ten to twenty thousand people trying it — which is what the TikTok/store work is actually for. This is a marketing problem as much as a code one.

Tax: that "$3,000 take-home" is pre-tax. As self-employment, set aside ~25–30% — so a real $3k in pocket means aiming closer to $4k of draw.