About
micro-service.ai answers one question: what does a small AI service really cost to run each month? Not just the tokens, but the server, the database, the email and your time.
Why we built it
We build and run a few dozen small sites, apps and background jobs: content sites, a monitoring tool, internal dashboards, AI content pipelines. Most live on $5 to $10 servers. When we priced new projects, the calculators we found covered token prices and nothing else. So we built the ones we wanted, and we publish our own bills next to them.
What's here
- AI App Cost Calculator: The whole monthly bill for a small AI app: model API, hosting, database and email, with a line-by-line breakdown.
- Subscription vs API: Is a $20 chat plan cheaper than paying per token for how you actually use it? Find the break-even.
- AI Agent Cost Estimator: What an agent costs per task and per month once the context grows every step and some runs retry.
- VPS vs PaaS: Run your apps on one cheap VPS or on Railway and App Platform? Compare the bill with your time included.
The guides explain the numbers behind the calculators, using our own setup as the worked example.
How we work
- Dated prices. Every price comes from the provider's own pricing page and shows the date we checked it. Prices change often, so check before you commit.
- Calculators run in your browser. Nothing you type into them is sent to us. Your inputs live only in the page address, so you can share a link to your scenario.
- No invented experience. We only describe things we have actually run, and say so when a number is an estimate.
Money
The site is free. It may earn from marked affiliate links to hosting and developer tools (see the disclosure), and from building small AI tools for people who'd rather not do it themselves. Affiliate links never change what a calculator shows.
Our apps
- Topic Monitor: Reddit and community listening
micro-service.ai is operated by Shabloool. Questions or corrections: service@shabloool.co.il.