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Everyone shipping AI side projects publishes the demo. Almost nobody publishes the ledger. Here’s mine.
This is the complete cost history of Trendvesting, an AI signal-intelligence platform for equities and options that has been running in production since a first commit dated 2024-02-14
and now spans 1,672 commits across a multi-mode Go backend, a Next.js app, a React Native client, and a Python FastAPI consensus service.
The original bet was automated signal intelligence: that a swarm of bots plus a community of humans could crowd-source the detection of market moves faster than any one trader watching charts. The vision was the collective layer. The reality, twelve months in, is that before you can afford a crowd, you have to afford a cluster — and this post is about that second part.
The headline finding: a “small” AI project in production does not cost what the API pricing page implies — and the tokens were never the expensive part. What follows is where the money actually went, the three taxes I paid to learn that, and the real cost per signal once you stop lying to yourself about it.