Guides · Published 2026-10-17

Last verified against provider docs: October 17, 2026

What Does Each of Your Apps Actually Cost? How to Track It Per Project

Ask most indie developers what they spend on infrastructure each month and they can give you a rough number. Ask what one specific app costs and the answer gets vague. Ask which apps are still costing money even though nobody has touched them in months, and most people have to go check.

The reason is simple: bills are organized by provider, not by app. You get one invoice from your host, one from your cloud provider, one from each AI API, a few domain renewals, and maybe a server somewhere. Each invoice covers several projects, and every project draws on several invoices.

This guide covers how to build a per-app cost list by hand, which provider tools help, and what to do once you have the list.

Why your bills don't tell you what each app costs

One invoice per provider, many apps per invoice

A single hosting account usually runs several projects. A single cloud account might hold a database for one app, a storage bucket for another, and a server you set up for a weekend experiment. The invoice shows the total, and sometimes a line per service, but rarely a line per app.

One app, many invoices

Look at it from the other side. A typical small app might use:

That's five or so places to check for one app's monthly cost, and you have to do it for every app.

The apps you stopped using are the hardest to see

Active apps get looked at. The ones you stopped working on don't. They're still deployed, the domain still renews, and the server still runs. Each charge is small enough to ignore on its own, so they add up quietly.

Building a per-app cost list by hand

You can do all of this with a spreadsheet. It takes some time the first time through.

Step 1: Inventory everything

Make one row per app. For each one, note:

Step 2: Pull real numbers from each billing source

For each provider, find what you were actually charged, not the list price. A few provider tools help you split costs by project:

Other providers vary. Some have billing APIs or detailed invoices, and some only show a plan price.

Step 3: Handle providers with no billing data

Some providers don't expose billing through an API. For those, use the invoice or your card statement. Whatever you do, write down the real number or mark it unknown. Don't guess. A per-app list that mixes real charges with estimates is hard to trust and harder to act on.

Step 4: Keep your own entries separate

Sometimes you know a cost that no system can see, like a yearly domain you paid for at a registrar you haven't connected to anything. Record it, but mark it as entered by you so you can tell it apart from the verified numbers.

Add context: page views and revenue

A cost on its own doesn't tell you much. $20/mo is fine for an app with users and revenue, and a waste for an app with neither.

If you use analytics, add page views per app. If an app takes payments, add its revenue. Then the obvious red flag stands out: real cost, no traffic, no revenue, no recent commits.

What to do with the list

Once every app has a row, sort by cost and go through them:

Then plan to redo the list regularly, because new projects appear and costs change.

Keeping it current

The manual version tends to go stale. It's a lot of tabs to revisit every month, and the forgotten apps are exactly the ones you won't think to recheck.

How CobwebCheck does this

CobwebCheck is a cost tracker for all your apps. It tracks what every app costs you, and catches the ones quietly billing you after you've stopped using them.

Free: a full scan that shows your totals (verified spend, entered, and unknown) and your top 3 apps.

Paid ($9/mo or $90/yr): - per-app costs, verdicts, next steps and exports - ongoing tracking: - a weekly re-check of connected key-based billing sources (cloud providers, Cloudflare, AI admin keys) - monthly cost snapshots per app with 6 months of history - a weekly digest email, sent only when something changed: new charges, increases over 20%, or newly detected services

Vercel and bank-statement costs refresh when you run a scan.

Everything CobwebCheck requests, stores and keeps is listed on the permissions page. To see what a report looks like first, the sample report uses fictional apps and needs no login.

See what every app costs you. Read-only, about two minutes, nothing to install.

Join the waitlist → See a sample report

Sources

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