Wednesday, November 4th, 2026
I know it's frowned upon to spend time on cutting costs instead of growth - but there is something about it that I find super satisfying.
Making a tiny website that kinda runs by itself as profitable as possible is very fun - and it's easy to measure.
Last week I spent a day seeing if I could save some cash, and ended up cutting around $1,000+/mo. I just gave Claude access to my codebase, server logs & billing accounts - this is what it cut:
Server costs: ~ $600/mo saved
Last month I added autoplaying videos to PromptBase. They look awesome - but ballooned my cloud networking costs, so the first step was for Claude to optimize these by changing things like bitrate, size & length.
I had to batch re-process around 10,000 videos, but it only took a few hours. The cache-header I had set was also too short, so that was increased. In total this saved around $120/mo.
Every og:image on the site was also using the raw several megabyte original images instead of the resized ones for some reason. I totally missed this, and switching to the optimised ones saved around $40/mo - this was a 1 line code change!
The biggest win though was switching my entire media CDN from Google Cloud over to Cloudflare - this made my network egress costs (around $15/day) basically free!
AI costs: ~ $300/mo saved
I was using an older AI model: Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite for most behind the scenes things on PromptBase, like testing, moderation and reviewing.
I've now switched to GPT 6 Luna which is smarter and about 10x cheaper.
Subscriptions: ~ $450/mo
Claude didn't help much with these but I cancelled X business ($200/mo) - I tried it for a month and found little benefit other than a nice gold checkmark.
I also downgraded from Cloudflare Business ($200/mo) - I had everything I needed on the $20 Cloudflare Pro plan. Plus I found a few other subscriptions I no longer needed.
Total: ~ $1350/mo
or ~ $16,200/yr - not bad for an afternoon's work!
In hindsight, with AI, cutting costs is way easier than before. It caught things I would never see in my sprawling codebase and error logs.
It's definitely easier than trying to add $16k in ARR in a day - so spending time doing this every few months is worth it I think. I'm sure these costs will balloon again.
Now - time to get ready for some WoW Forever!
