As a developer, there’s nothing more exciting than seeing users start using your product. But when I saw the series of bank notifications on my mom’s phone, totaling nearly a thousand yuan, all I felt was a cold wave of fear.
My mistake was simple to the point of being almost childish. At first, my mind was full of AIVA’s feature iterations—how to improve video resolution, shorten rendering time, and let users create satisfying videos with simpler commands.
I poured all my energy into debugging code and optimizing user experience, yet I had completely never calculated the real cost behind generating a single video. Servers, computing power, storage, domain fees… all the fundamental costs that support the product’s operation were taken for granted and ignored by me.
It wasn’t until my mom placed that near-thousand-yuan deduction notice in front of me and asked me to calculate the cost of generating a single video that I suddenly woke up: I only thought about how to make the product alive, but didn’t know how to keep it alive.
During beta testing, people often asked me how I would price the official version. I could never answer, because I truly didn’t know, and had never thought seriously about it. In school, when doing science projects, I never calculated costs—I always assumed investment was just part of doing the project.
It was only this time that I suddenly realized entrepreneurship isn’t just about making a product, but about building a sustainable value system. Cost calculation is the survival baseline for any startup product.
That day, I sat at my computer, closed the code editor for product iteration, opened a blank Excel sheet, and did three things:
For the first time, I completely listed AIVA’s cost structure: monthly server fees, peak computing power, cloud storage, various service fees… After calculating line by line, I got a number that made my scalp tingle: generating a one-minute short video cost as much as 20 yuan. This number instantly shattered all my blind optimism.
I then performed a nearly terrifying projection: if, at the beta testing pace, 1,000 new users joined per month, each trying 2 videos for free, the total loss would be:
1,000 users × 2 videos × 20 = 40,000 yuan.
For a 14-year-old me, this was an utterly unaffordable sum. This cold number dragged me fully back from my product dream into reality.