Hey, it's Jared.
Just over 30 days ago, I built and deployed a personal
operations dashboard that I run my life from.
And I've gotten a lot of response from the original video
that I posted that hit over 100,000 views just the other day.
And one of the questions that I have received quite often
is how much it actually costs to run my life
from a custom application that I built with Colaud Code.
And it actually has been pretty inexpensive.
And we're going to walk through the costs.
And I'm going to show you some of the changes
that I've made over the last 30 days to the platform
as I've gotten to use it more and tried
to implement it more into my life.
Now, just as a general recap, here is the system.
And what this does is manages my day-to-day,
my projects, my tasks, if I have notes or anything
that I want to save, those all go into this system.
And then I also use it as a habit tracker as well.
So this replaces a lot of different applications
that I was using.
I was using To-do-ist for tasks and trying
to manage projects in To-do-ist.
But mostly was using a notes app to manage projects.
So tasks would end up living somewhere else.
And then my notes were kind of scattered
amongst different applications.
As I tried to use different tools that
would interact with To-do-ists, sometimes being
successful, often failing.
And so I decided to build this system because I can.
With Colaud Code, it makes it really easy
to deploy something like this.
But it takes a bit of thinking beforehand.
I've been posting to my sub-stack about the process
and kind of the mindset around building something like this
and the way that you need to think in order
to create something that's actually useful.
One of the things that I see over and over again
on YouTube especially is people talking about building
things with Claude Code.
But then the next week, they're talking
about a new thing that they built.
And then the next video is a new thing again.
And they are continuously moving from tool to tool,
not actually sticking with one thing
iterating on it and improving it and making it better.
And so it's kind of hard to follow those people
because they never actually seem to integrate
anything into their own life.
And I want to build a tool that I can run my life from
and that's what I have done.
So first of all, I have changed up the today page.
It's called the briefing now, even though it still says
today over here, it's the briefing.
And I get a brief of how many events I have
and how many tasks are opened.
And then I can see that more expanded over here.
And then I could see any domain areas of my life
that haven't been updated recently.
Right now it says I need to capture a journal entry
because it's been seven days since my last journal entry.
And so if I go too long without making an update
to a client project or some other aspect of my life,
it's gonna show up here so that I could at least check in
with it, make an update or dismiss
the notification altogether.
But it resurfaces things and lets me know
when there's something that I'm falling behind on.
And no other tool that's connected to my project
and tasks has been able to do that.
Most other aspects of the application
has relatively stayed the same
with maybe some minor little UI tweaks here and there.
But as far as the way projects, content, tasks, people,
the library, the way that all of those things work,
it's still pretty much the same.
So I'm not gonna go over that again.
But I will talk about how much it actually cost to run this.
This application wouldn't cost really anything
to run other than hosting costs.
But it is connected to Anthropic AI
and also OpenAI.
It's connected to OpenAI for audio transcription.
And so when I open the app on my phone,
so if I go to my phone and open the web app here,
and I tap on this microphone,
there's also voice capture on desktop.
And I also have a shortcut that I wired up
as a complication on my Apple Watch
that allows me to speak in a task
or an update to a project.
And so I'm using the OpenAI API to transcribe that.
And then it takes that transcription
and sends it over to the Anthropic AI to parse.
And so Anthropic AI will actually parse that
and put the information where it needs to be.
It will identify is that a task?
Is that an update to a project?
Is that a new note or a quote that he wants to save?
It will understand where that needs to go
and then place it in the appropriate location.
One thing that I did add is kind of a fallback.
In case it didn't understand what project the tasks
should be associated to.
If it can't figure that out,
then I actually get a notification on the today screen here
that shows me that I have something in my inbox
that needs to be connected to a project.
That way I don't ever end up with tasks that are abandoned
and I can't find them,
whether because maybe a date wasn't properly assigned
or they weren't attached to a project,
I can't count the amount of times that that's happened to me
using to-do-ist or Apple reminders
or even notion back when I had built out
an elaborate system within that platform.
So with that connection to both of these APIs,
I often get asked the question,
how expensive is it to run my life?
Now, the thumbnail of this video
might have given away a teaser,
but first let's look at OpenAI.
That's actually the cheapest one.
And you can see here how often I'm using
the audio version, the audio capture.
I still find myself manually typing things in.
There is a quick capture option that lets me use
natural language input to add tasks and updates
and notes and quotes and all those things.
And that's just gonna connect to the Anthropic API only.
It's not gonna need audio transcription
because I'm not verbally speaking something in.
So you can see that I haven't utilized that too much.
On days with purple here, I'd say this was probably two
to three audio transcriptions and same with yesterday's date
was like two to three audio transcriptions.
This day I obviously used it a lot
and it only cost me one cent.
And so you can see down here,
this is costing well below one cent.
So if I was to speak my updates
into the app multiple times per day,
it's costing me a penny maybe to put five or six updates in.
And of course it's gonna depend on the length
of those updates, but the updates are often something
like create a new task for Hill Media Group
tomorrow at 2 p.m. to call back such and such client.
And so it will add the task,
it will connect it to the project,
it will assign at the times and I will get a reminder
when that happens.
And so it automatically transcribes that.
It's not a very long transcription for it to take care of
and it handles it and it's extremely cheap.
And so if we scroll down here under audio transcription,
you can see here the amount of requests that it's counting.
I feel like there has been a few more than that.
Like definitely when I launched this back in late May,
I used it a lot more than this.
So but this is a better representation
of how often that I used it.
Now let's look at Claude.
If we look at Claude and I have the API key
for the ops dashboard selected,
you can see the amount of tokens in and out
and the connections here.
You can see that I'm not using it every single day.
There are days that I'm manually entering things in instead.
I don't have to use audio or the quick capture option.
I can just directly type things in.
And so if I click add a new task and create a task
and manually enter that information in here,
it's not using any API.
I'm just I'm giving it the title adding notes,
assigning a date, assigning a priority,
putting it in a specific domain or project
and giving it a time to remind me
and then adding that task.
There's nothing there that requires an API
to anthropic or open AI.
And that's how I end up entering in most of the tasks
because it's still just more natural for me to do that.
I need to get in the habit of using the command J capture.
So if I hit command J, it opens up this quick capture box
and then I can add in the task or add something in.
You can see here, there's a couple of examples
that it gives me.
And so if I type that in, it's only going to utilize
the anthropic API.
If I record and use the microphone by clicking
on the microphone and enabling the microphone,
which it's going to use the microphone from my phone here,
then that's going to use both of the APIs.
It's going to send it off for transcription.
And then it's going to take that transcription
and process that through the anthropic API.
So the costs have been relatively low.
Let's actually look at the costs for Claude or anthropic API.
So we'll click on cost.
We'll go ahead and choose the ops dashboard.
And June, let's just choose last 30 days.
And we're at 95 cents for the last 30 days.
And so you could see, like I said, there are some days
that I did not use it.
And there are some days that I used it minimally.
But even on a heavy day, it's costing me 23 cents,
not even a half dollar.
And so the actual API usage is extremely small.
Now, the host, the actual files of this project itself,
I am using X Cloud as I mentioned in my original video.
And I'm using the personal light plan,
which is a premium plan here for $7.50 per month.
This is one gig of RAM, 32 gigs of SSD storage,
one VCPU, one terabyte of bandwidth,
and unlimited sites that can run there.
And there are actually four different things
that are running on this specific host account.
First of all, it's the operations dashboard,
which has both the web and the API running there.
And so there's the API that manages the cron jobs,
which triggers refreshing the Google Calendar connection
and a handful of other features, as well as the code base itself.
But I'm also running umami analytics,
which I have connected to all of my client sites.
And so umami analytics is connecting to over 100 websites,
pulling in analytics data.
And so that's running on this $7.50 per month host account.
And another tool that I use for my agency called Uptime Kuma,
which monitors the uptime of all of my client websites.
And so there's also over 100 websites that are being pinged,
continuously to make sure that they are live.
And I get notifications if one of those websites goes down.
So those two tools are much more resource intensive
than the actual operations dashboard itself.
I'm sure you can get by easily on even the $5 a month plan
for your operations dashboard
if you were going to build something very similar
to what I'm doing.
Now X Cloud isn't necessarily the best option
for this type of deployment,
but it works well for me.
I'm using X Cloud to host all of my client websites,
including my own websites.
And so I already have a relationship with them.
Their system works absolutely fantastic.
And I've had zero problems with my own websites,
my client websites, and also with this project.
So if you look at the total cost of running this project
on a month, you could say maybe $8.50.
It's definitely below $10.
And if you subtract for those other tools that I'm using,
it's probably closer to around $5 to run this project
every single month.
And if I was using voice capture several times per day,
I could see maybe getting closer to where
the Anthropic API might cost $5 to $8 a month
or something like that.
So all things considered,
we're talking about the same cost that another tool
that might only do a fraction of what this tool does
would cost to use per month.
Not to mention you're probably going to end up
having to stack multiple tools together
to get the features that you want
and you might end up spending something closer
to $50 per month on subscriptions
just to get the features.
And most of those features aren't going to talk to each other
because they're in different applications.
So yes, I'm running my entire life and business
for around $7.50 per month using a custom application
that I built with Clawed Code.
And I'm going to continue to share some of the different aspects
of this project through additional videos
and also over on my substack.
So if you want to follow along and get a little bit more
of a look behind the scenes,
you'll want to make sure to jump over on substack
because I'm sharing a lot more over there.
And over the last couple of weeks,
there have been hundreds of people joining
so that they can follow along
and we can take part in this together.
I think we're all tired of chasing the new systems,
building something new,
maybe going back to something off the shelf
and then trying to build something again
and being frustrated and wasting a ton of time.
If you're like me,
you're ready for something that just works
that you can continue to iterate on,
make better and improve
and finally own all of your data.
And that is exactly what I'm doing here
with the operations dashboard that I built.
So make sure to subscribe to the channel,
make sure to head on over to the substack
and subscribe there.
And if you have any questions,
leave a comment under this video
or if you're a member over on substack,
you can chat with me directly.
But that's gonna do it for this video.
Thanks for watching.
We'll see you back in the next one.
Take care.