Operational Costs

This site was built with one goal in mind: to create a helpful tool that makes applying to jobs easier and less tedious. That's still the number one goal driving development behind this site. It's because of this goal, that we -- the developers behind xptracker -- do not care if it turns a profit. As users of our own product, we get what we need from it: a showpiece that demonstrates we know how to build a website, a helpful tool that keeps our career milestones organized, and a development environment that lets us learn and implement new technologies.

We're sharing our operational costs mostly for the curious-minded and for any developers thinking about building an application similar in nature. Let's break it down. First, here are the actual hosting costs:

Operationally speaking, it's fairly affordable to host xptracker. It costs us ~$67 a month to host the site. Split that three ways, and you're looking $~22 per developer. That may seem like a lot to spend on a website that doesn't turn a profit, but most of that cost is coming from an entirely optional service: Proton Mail Business. 

If we remove that cost from the equation, we are looking at $21/month, or $7/month per developer. Totally reasonable. So why splurge for Proton Mail? Simple. It offers us a single platform through which to manage all of our communications, documentation, file sharing, and password sharing.

Future Payment Plans

While xptracker remains free for now -- tell all your friends! -- we will eventually make it a paid platform. If you have an account by the time that happens, don't worry, you'll keep your account for free and will not have to pay any additional fees. We believe your data is your data, and it would be wrong for us to pay-lock you from accessing it. That also means that whatever payment option we do introduce in the future, will be lifetime access. No subscriptions.

Instead, our plan is to separate the features on the site into two categories: AI and non-AI. Anything that uses AI will require an additional monthly subscription. Anything that does not use AI will simply be included for all existing and new members. The thought here being, that AI introduces a lot of monthly overhead to our operational costs, so any users who want to opt-in and use it, will pay to support it. And any users who wish to forgo the AI functionality will have the option to at no additional costs. That leaves us with a very simple payment model:

These are the numebers we're currently deliberating. So while finalized costs can't be provided yet, you can get an idea of the ballpark figures. Keep an eye out for future posts if you're curious about what AI features we're developing. For now, thank you so much for reading! We hope you found this post useful.

If you have any questions or would like to reach out to us, please use our support page.

xptrackerteam