As a developer, nothing is more exciting than seeing real users start using your product. But when I saw a long string of bank debit notifications on my mom’s phone—adding up to nearly 1,000 RMB—what I felt wasn’t excitement. It was a cold, sinking fear.
My mistake was almost laughably simple. In the beginning, my entire mind was filled with AIVA’s feature iterations: how to improve video resolution, how to shorten rendering time, how to help users create satisfying results with simpler prompts. I poured all my energy into debugging and optimizing the user experience, but I never truly calculated the real cost of generating a single video. Server rental, compute usage, storage fees, domain renewals—every “boring” but fundamental expense that keeps a product running—I ignored them as if they didn’t matter.
Then my mom put that near-1,000 RMB statement in front of me and asked me to calculate the cost per video. That was the moment I woke up: I had only been thinking about how to make the product come alive, without knowing how to make it stay alive.
During beta testing, people asked me how I would price the official version. Every time, I had no answer—because I didn’t know, and I’d never seriously thought about it. In school innovation projects, we never calculated costs. I always assumed “investment” was just part of building something.
This time, I finally understood: entrepreneurship isn’t just about building a product—it’s about building a system of sustainable value. Cost accounting is the survival line.
That day, I sat down at my computer, closed my code editor, opened a blank Excel sheet, and did three things.
I created AIVA’s first cost structure table. Monthly server fees, peak compute surcharges, cloud storage expansion… I calculated each line item one by one and arrived at a number that made my scalp tingle:
Generating a 1-minute short video cost as much as 20 RMB.
That single number shattered all my blind optimism.
Next, I ran a calculation that felt almost terrifying. If we continued at the beta pace—say, 1,000 new users in a month, each with two free trials—my total loss would be:
1,000 users × 2 trials × 20 RMB = 40,000 RMB
For a 14-year-old founder, that was a completely unaffordable amount. That cold number pulled me out of the “product dream” and back into reality.
Staring at that cost table and running scenarios over and over, I realized there were only two viable paths to survival:
Option A: Reduce costs aggressively.