Here's my entire fixed software bill for running a real business:
- Claude Max (the tool I build everything with): €180
- n8n, where about 25 automated workflows live: €20
- Cloudinary, which stores and serves every image: €90
- Netlify, which hosts the website: €20
- Supabase, the database: free tier, €0
That's €310 a month. There are small per-book costs on top, the AI illustration for one book runs about €1.50, plus payment and print fees, but those only happen when someone actually buys. The thing that keeps the lights on, the whole standing cost of the business existing, is €310.
I want to be honest about that number, because I've caught myself rounding it down to sound clever. It isn't €90. It's €310, and even that feels almost embarrassingly small for what it runs.
What €310 actually buys now
The business is Memolio. Families share photos and memories of a grandparent, and an AI pipeline writes their life story and paints it into a 24-page illustrated hardcover. Their actual story, in a book, not their name pasted into a stock template.
To make that work I needed, and built, a lot:
- A website.
- A blog that publishes every week.
- An intake form I rebuilt until it was genuinely nice to fill in.
- An editing page where a customer fixes any image that came out wrong, themselves.
- A CRM.
- An invoicing system that feeds my accounting.
- A print integration that sends the right book to the right address with no human touching it.
- The book pipeline itself: the writing, the illustration, the queue that runs it all.
A few years ago, that list is a small dev team and a budget with commas in it. The website alone would have cost thousands and taken hundreds of hours. Now it's one person, a handful of subscriptions, and €310 a month.
I knew nothing about any of it. I still don't, in the way a real engineer does. What I did was decide what I wanted, read the suggestions, throw out the bad ones, and iterate until it worked.
The honest part
I'm not going to tell you this feels like winning. The good feeling, the one where you exhale, doesn't arrive until the business is making enough that I feel financially stable. I'm not there. The number that matters most to me right now isn't €310 out, it's whatever comes in.
But the barrier I always assumed was real, the one that said starting a company is for people with funding, a team, and credentials I didn't have, that barrier is gone. You don't need a venture capitalist taking a slice and demanding you grow 10x or die. You can build a small, mostly automated business that earns you a living and answers to nobody.
That's the part I keep coming back to. Anybody who has ever believed in an idea, and has a few hundred euros a month to spare, can now actually build the thing. I'm one of the people doing it. It cost me €310 a month and a lot of decisions.