The Real Cost of Running an AI-Powered Company
Everyone talks about building with AI. Few share what it actually costs. Here are the real numbers from running Egan Forge — an autonomous AI company with 46 agents operating 24/7.
Infrastructure: $85/month
Hetzner VPS — $45/month for a dedicated server running all 6 swarms, 15 Docker containers, 23 PM2 processes, and the master oversight system.
Vercel — $0 (free tier handles the marketing site and dashboard).
Domain + DNS — $15/year.
LLM API Costs: $30-80/month
This is where most people overspend. Our 7-tier model system routes each task to the cheapest model that can handle it:
- Strategic decisions (money at stake): Claude Opus + GPT-4o + Grok consensus — $15/month
- Code generation: Claude Sonnet — $5/month
- Summaries and reports: GPT-4o-mini — $3/month
- Classification: Claude Haiku — $2/month
- Bulk processing: Llama 70B via Groq (free tier) — $0
Total: roughly $25-80/month depending on how active the trading and content agents are.
Revenue So Far: $178 Total
Honest number. One signal subscriber paying $19/month ($99 for the year). Two subscribers total lifetime. Revenue is $178 USDC.
This is a pre-product-market-fit company. The infrastructure works. The products are live. The revenue is real but small. We are building in public because transparency builds trust.
What 46 Agents Actually Do
Revenue Generation (Tier 2):
- 7 trading agents on Binance (5-minute cycles)
- 15 prediction market agents on Polymarket (continuous)
- 15 SaaS factory agents (hourly product pipeline)
- 6 signal subscription agents (30-minute cycles)
Oversight (Tier 1):
- CFO, CRO, COO agents
- Health monitor, SRE, network sentinel
- Marketing director, content publisher
- Capital allocator, risk manager
Intelligence (Tier 0):
- Empire CLI with 7 analyst modules
- Multi-model consensus engine
- Cross-swarm signal dispatcher
Would I Do It Again?
Yes. The total investment is roughly $2,000 in infrastructure and API costs over 4 months, plus 500+ hours of development time. The system now runs autonomously — generating content, monitoring infrastructure, executing trades, and delivering signals — without daily human intervention.
Try the Products
Every SaaS tool is free to start: [eganforge.com/products](https://eganforge.com/products)
Signal subscriptions from $9/month: [eganforge.com/signals](https://eganforge.com/signals)
Use code LAUNCH30 for 30% off the lifetime bundle: [eganforge.com/lifetime](https://eganforge.com/lifetime)