So, whenever I see a thread about some anon developing an app,

Sometimes you need $5/month for a VPS.

>>1816993
that's 60 a year

They want to be paid to work full-time on it, ditching a job, for this to become their income, finishing it faster than doing it in their free time otherwise.

shit's expensive

>>1816989
Saw an interesting breakdown of running a SaaS app the other day

https://cushionapp.com/running-costs/

The developer needs to spend money on:
Domain Registration
SSL certificate & management
Web app server
Web app DB
Continuous delivery services
Exception tracking & log management
Asset hosting
Email hosting
Proprietary software
Hardware for local storage
And other bullshit

Most individual services are pretty cheap, but you can end up in a situation where you're burning hundreds of dollars a month just to run everything needed for production.

If you're not expecting a lot of traffic (but if everything is going well you should be expecting lots of traffic) at your initial release, you can use the free tier service from cloud providers to cut costs, at the price of lower connection speeds and processing power.

Also need to keep in mind the biggest money sink: other people. Depending on your (lack of) expertise you'll probably need a designer, advertising/marketing, front-end/back-end engineers, and a database/system admin. If you're taking on employees you may also need an accountant as well as a lawyer for any legal issues you may face.