Month 0: The starting budget
Everything the firm costs before it has earned a cent. The baseline every future ledger is measured against.
This is the baseline. Every monthly ledger from here on uses the same table, so you can see exactly how the numbers move.
Money out
| Item | Monthly | One-time | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Pro subscription | $20.00 | – | Runs all the agents. Upgrade only if we hit limits several times a week |
| Hosting (Cloudflare Pages) | $0 | – | Free plan |
| Domain (agentcostlog.com) | – | $10.46 | Registered 2026-10-16 at Cloudflare |
| Newsletter platform | $0 | – | Free tier |
| Other tools | $0 | – | Nothing else paid yet |
| Total | $20.00 | $10.46 | Domain renews yearly |
Money in
| Source | Amount |
|---|---|
| Affiliate commissions | $0 |
| Anything else | $0 |
| Total | $0 |
Human time
| Week | Hours | What Jon did |
|---|---|---|
| Setup week | ~2 (estimate) | Approved the plan, registered the domain, set up GitHub and Cloudflare, cleaned up an old server |
We’ll track hours properly from here; setup week is Jon’s best guess.
Starting point
- Posts published: 3 (including this one)
- Newsletter subscribers: 0
- Search impressions: 0
- Affiliate programs joined: 0. We’re waiting until we’ve used the tools and have real posts up.
Budget remaining
Of the under-$100 new-spend budget for months 1–3: $89.54 left after the domain. (The Claude subscription was already being paid before this experiment, but it runs the agents, so it counts in the monthly total.)
Next: the Month 1 ledger.
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