Budget & Investment

Core costs to build and operate Meta Esthetic AI (hardware, domains, hosting, DB, and AI tokens) plus a live break-even calculator.

One-time Setup (range)

$6,000 – $7,000

Hardware, domains, initial hosting credit, DB setup, seed tokens.

Monthly Operating (range)

$1,000 – $1,800

Hosting, DB, tokens. Comfortable headroom for active usage.

Performance Setup

$8,000 – $9,000

Higher-end hardware + redundancy; ~$2,000/month operating.

Core Investment Plan (Builder-Focused)

Strictly the items you asked to keep: hardware, domains, hosting, DB, AI tokens.

# Category Description One-Time Monthly Purpose
1 Developer Hardware & Setup MacBook Pro M3 Pro (14") 12-core CPU / 18-core GPU / 36 GB RAM / 1 TB SSD $2,500–$3,000 Run Cursor, full AI stack, DB syncs without throttling
2 Domains & Branding metaesthetic.ai / .com / .kr / .th + email + SSL $400–$600 $20 Global brand control, DNS + mail routing
3 Hosting & Cloud Infra Vercel Pro (front-end), Railway (APIs), Cloudflare Pro $500 $150–$300 Scalable deployment for 4 app verticals w/ CDN & WAF
4 Database & Storage Supabase Pro (Postgres + Auth + Storage) $300 $100–$200 Central data for patients, machines, scheduling
5 AI Tokens & Model Usage OpenAI (GPT-4/5), embeddings, monitoring credits $1,000 seed $500–$1,500 Covers public + doctor chat flows and early clinic usage

Lean Launch (est.)

$4,700–$5,400 one-time

Realistic Scale-Ready

$6,000–$7,000 one-time

Monthly Operating

$1,000–$1,800 / month

Break-Even Calculator

Estimate monthly revenue vs. operating costs. Adjust inputs to see surplus or shortfall.

MRR

$3,990

Burn

$1,500

Surplus / Shortfall

$2,490

Tip: At $399/clinic, 5 clinics ≈ $1,995 MRR, which covers ~ $1,500 burn with a small buffer.