The cost conversation usually stops at launch
This register's own cost breakdown answers a real question — what does it cost to get something built — and stops exactly where a second, quieter bill starts: the day it ships and someone other than you might actually use it. That second bill is rarely denominated in dollars, and that's worth taking seriously rather than treating as a footnote.
The dollar cost is smaller than it sounds
Across every app on this register scored BUILD IT or BORDERLINE, 85% run on a genuinely free hosting tier — no monthly bill at all. The remaining 15%, the ones that outgrow a free tier, average $9 to $18 a month, which is less than most of the subscriptions this register reviews in the first place. If the worry is 'what will this cost me to keep running,' the honest answer for most ideas is close to nothing, and the ones where it isn't are still cheap.
What actually costs something is time
None of the real maintenance load shows up in a hosting bill. A library gets a security patch and something quietly breaks until you update it. A payment or email API changes its interface and a feature that worked yesterday doesn't today. Someone who actually uses the thing you built finds a bug, or worse, likes it enough to ask for a feature — which is the good version of the same problem: it means the project is no longer just yours.
None of this is priced in dollars. It's priced in whether you're still willing to open the repository in six months, which is a genuinely different question than whether you were willing to spend one weekend on it.
The moment free tiers stop being free
The 15% of apps with a real hosting bill mostly cross that line for one reason: enough real people started using the thing that a free tier's limits — bandwidth, database rows, function invocations — stopped being generous enough. That's almost always a success signal, not a failure one. It's also the first concrete moment a side project stops being something you can abandon without consequence and starts being something with real people depending on it, which is worth noticing on purpose rather than realizing after the fact.
A better question than 'what will this cost'
The dollar number was never the real gate. The more honest question, before starting something meant to actually stay running: would you still want to own this in six months, after the interesting weekend-build part is over and what's left is routine upkeep? Some things are genuinely worth building even if the answer is no — a scoped-down MVP built to prove an idea, then set aside, doesn't need the same commitment as something meant to run indefinitely. Knowing which one you're actually building is worth deciding before you start, not after.