Most founders share revenue screenshots on Twitter but conveniently hide actual costs and expenses. Here's my completely real P&L at $4.2K MRR running solo, showing what actually goes into keeping a SaaS running monthly without the fake transparency. Total monthly expenses $1,340, actual profit $2,860, running at 68% margin which is decent but not the 90% margins beginners imagine. Infrastructure at $180 monthly: Hosting and database on Railway at $85 keeping everything running reliably, domain and SSL certificates at $15/month, backup services and uptime monitoring at $35, CDN for faster global loading at $25, transactional email sending through Postmark at $20. Can't really cut any of these without the product literally breaking or becoming unreliable for customers.
Marketing and sales at $90 monthly: ConvertKit for email marketing and automation at $29, paid communities and directory listings at $40/month for ongoing visibility where customers find me, small ad testing budget at $21 experimenting with channels. This category directly drives most new signups each month so cutting it hurts growth. Tools and software at $165 monthly: Stripe payment processing fees averaging $140 monthly at current revenue which is completely unavoidable, Linear for roadmap and issue tracking at $8, Plausible for simple analytics at $9, GitHub for code hosting at $4, miscellaneous small tools at $4. Support and operations at $80 monthly: Contract help for 4 hours monthly at $20/hour handling overflow customer support during busy periods. Keeps me from complete burnout and lets me focus on building.
Legal and admin at $95 monthly: Accountant at $65/monthly handling bookkeeping and quarterly taxes properly, business liability insurance at $30. Total $1,340 in actual real monthly costs to run $4.2K MRR business, leaving $2,860 profit before paying myself. Not counting my own time investment which is the real cost, probably 80-100 hours monthly between building features, customer support, marketing, and operations. Effective hourly rate around $28-35 depending on the month. What's missing from most revenue celebration posts: the actual costs eating 30-40% of revenue before you even pay yourself anything. Found this pattern studying real SaaS P&Ls in FounderToolkit, most bootstrapped products actually run 60-75% margins, not the mythical 90% margins people imagine software having. Understanding real costs helps set realistic revenue targets, you need $10K MRR to actually pay yourself $6-7K monthly after all expenses.