I’m Sixteen and Already €1,320 in the Red

The short version: kleosvic is currently €120 in the red. If I count the computer I bought to build it, the number is closer to €1,320.

The €120 is made up of four actual expenses: €25 for the Google Play developer account, €15 for the domain, €40 for microphones I have not used yet, and €40 on miscellaneous expenses and coffee. The computer is harder to classify because I also use it for school, other projects and practically everything else I do on a computer.

I am not going to pretend those are the same expense. They are not. But the distinction is useful because the cost of building something is rarely as simple as the number that leaves your bank account.

What actually costs money

Software has a strange reputation for being almost free to make. Once you know how to write the code, writing another line costs practically nothing, and there is no factory, warehouse or physical inventory sitting behind every release. That makes software look unusually cheap compared with almost anything else you could try to build.

But the line of code is not the product. The product needs somewhere to exist, it needs to be distributed and tested, and it needs hardware and services around it. None of those things are particularly expensive on their own, which is exactly why they are so easy to ignore when you are looking at the cost of building something.

Where the money went

The first €25 went to Google for the Play developer account. It is not an exciting purchase, but without it I cannot distribute an Android app through Google Play, which means there is no real way to put something I built in front of users and find out what happens when it leaves my own phone.

Then there is the €15 domain. kleosvic.com costs about €15 a year, which is almost irrelevant financially, but it is still part of making the project exist outside my computer. I wanted kleosvic to have its own place on the internet rather than being another collection of projects sitting anonymously in a folder.

The next €40 went on microphones, which is probably the easiest expense on this list to question because I have not actually used them yet. I bought them for the videos and other content I want to make around kleosvic, so for now they are simply equipment waiting for a reason to leave the box.

The final €40 is less precise. It is miscellaneous spending and coffee, the sort of thing that is difficult to classify individually but still exists when you add everything together. There is no dramatic invoice hiding behind the project, just a collection of fairly ordinary purchases.

The computer is the awkward number

The biggest single cost is also the hardest one to classify. I spent about €1,200 on the computer I use to build kleosvic, but putting the entire amount down as a kleosvic expense would be misleading because the computer is not exclusively used for the project.

I am a student, so I use it for school, other projects and plenty of things that have absolutely nothing to do with software development. At the same time, I bought it because I wanted a machine capable of doing this properly. Android Studio, Flutter, builds, emulators, the website and design work all run on the same machine.

That is why I think it is worth mentioning without pretending it belongs entirely to kleosvic. The computer is not an expense the project can claim on a spreadsheet, but it is part of the infrastructure that made the project possible.

The part nobody puts in the spreadsheet

The money is actually the easy part. The harder number is two months, because for roughly two months I have been working on kleosvic practically every day. Building, fixing, testing, writing, designing, publishing, breaking things and then fixing them again has taken considerably more time than the financial numbers suggest.

I could put a zero next to those hours in an expense spreadsheet because nobody is paying me for them. That does not make them free. They came from the same limited pool of time as school, studying, sleeping, seeing people and everything else I could have done during those hours.

I do not know what the monetary value of those two months is, and I do not think inventing a salary number would make the calculation more honest. What matters is that there is a large part of the cost that cannot be represented properly in euros.

Why I am not trying to hide the red

There is an easy way to talk about a project like this. Talk about what is coming next, talk about users, talk about products and talk about the upside, while quietly leaving out how much money and time went into getting there. I do not think that gives a particularly useful picture of what building something actually looks like.

kleosvic is still a project that costs me more than it returns. I am not particularly worried about that right now, because the point of this stage is not to make the numbers look good. It is to find out whether the things I am building are worth continuing.

There is nothing impressive about losing money. There is also nothing embarrassing about it when the amount is small and you know what you are learning from it. The interesting question is not whether the number is positive. It is whether the work behind it is moving somewhere.

What the money is actually buying

The money buys the ability to make the project real. It pays for distribution, the domain, equipment and the small pieces of infrastructure that sit underneath the software. None of those things are particularly exciting, but they remove the gap between having an idea and putting something in front of another person.

The computer buys something different. It gives me a machine capable of handling the development environment without becoming the limiting factor, while still being useful for everything else I do. That makes it a personal purchase as much as a project purchase, which is why I would rather describe it honestly than force it into the €120 figure.

The two months buy something else again. I now know more about Android, product design, testing, publishing and actually finishing software than I did when I started. Whether that knowledge turns out to be valuable depends on what I do with it next.

The expensive mistake is not the €15 domain

The expensive mistake would be spending six months building the wrong thing. That costs more than a domain, more than a developer account and more than most of the small purchases that make up the direct cost of a project.

The real loss is the time you cannot get back and the opportunity to spend it on something better. That is why I care more about testing ideas than making kleosvic look busy. A product can have good code, a good website and a perfectly functioning build and still be the wrong thing to build.

I would rather find that out early.

What's the plan?

I am turning sixteen soon, so by the next time you read one of these there is a decent chance I will be working at McDonald's. I am still a student, kleosvic is not paying me a salary, and €120 in expenses is a lot easier to justify when you are building something on the side than when you are trying to live from it.

So the plan is not to suddenly turn kleosvic into a company that supports me. I am going to keep building it around school, keep the costs low and see what happens when I put more things in front of people.

Maybe one of those things works. Maybe none of them do. Either way, I will probably still be writing code somewhere. The only question is whether there is a McDonald's uniform involved.

Where this goes

I am not expecting kleosvic to suddenly become profitable next month, and I am not interested in pretending that spending money makes a project valuable. It does not. The only thing that matters is what the spending allows me to build, test or learn, and whether that eventually becomes something worth continuing.

For now, I have spent a relatively small amount of money, bought a computer that I will use for much more than this project, and put roughly two months of daily work into making kleosvic real. The financial number is easy to understand. The time is harder, but probably more important.

I am fine with where that leaves me. Not because losing money is good, but because I am still early enough that the useful outcome is not a profitable spreadsheet. It is finding out what is worth building, and becoming better at building it.