# 12 Months of Trendvesting: The Real Unit Economics of a Production AI Side Project > Source: > Published: 2026-07-29 17:31:01+00:00 Member-only story # 12 Months of Trendvesting: The Real Unit Economics of a Production AI Side Project *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.