What $167 a Month Buys You
Fourteen websites. One radio station. An AI that costs less than your Spotify subscription. Here's what it actually costs to run the whole thing, and why we're telling you.
The Number
Here is the total monthly cost of running everything you see when you visit any of our fourteen websites, listen to Big Muddy Radio, read this magazine, or find a business in the Deep South Directory:
$167.
That's not a typo. That's not a marketing number with footnotes and asterisks. That's the actual infrastructure bill. Vercel: $20. Database: $13. AI costs: $9.33. Domain registrations, storage, streaming, the rest of it — pennies. The whole thing adds up to $167 a month, which is less than most people spend on their cable package.
We're telling you this because honesty is the only thing that makes any of this work.
What the $167 Buys
Fourteen domains. One codebase. A radio station running off a Mac Mini in a back room. A business directory with 1,425 businesses in Adams County alone. A touring company that books bands across the Deep South. A record label. A magazine — the one you're reading right now. Social media scheduling. Review management. Newsletter publishing. Photo galleries. Event calendars. Analytics dashboards.
All of it. $167 a month. Four people.
The AI costs are the part that makes tech people's eyebrows move. We spend $9.33 a month on artificial intelligence. That covers content generation, review drafting, social scheduling, and radio programming automation. For context, running comparable workloads through some of the big-name AI providers would cost roughly $625 a month. We're 67 times cheaper. The models got cheap. The expensive part was always knowing what to say.
How
Chase built the whole thing as one application. One codebase, one deployment, one thing to monitor at 2 a.m. when something breaks. Every domain — bigmuddytouring.com, bigmuddymagazine.com, bigmuddyradio.com, deepsouthdirectory.com, all fourteen of them — runs from the same server. When you visit bigmuddyradio.com, the system reads the web address and shows you the radio site. When you visit this magazine, same system, different face.
It's the same trick that large media companies use. The difference is they needed a thousand people and a building in Midtown Manhattan. We need Amy, Tracy, a good sound system, and this house.
The radio station is a Mac Mini. That's not a metaphor. It's a small silver computer sitting in a closet on the second floor, running open-source broadcasting software, streaming twenty-four hours a day. The total hardware investment was about $800. The electricity is negligible. The music is curated by humans who live here and care what it sounds like.
The Fourth Wall
Here is where we break the fourth wall, because we promised we would.
Some of the early content on this magazine was written with AI. Not this article — this one's a human, sitting on the porch, typing on a laptop, drinking coffee that Tracy made. But some of the earlier stuff, the first wave of articles when we were trying to get fourteen websites live with four people and not enough sleep? Yeah. An AI helped.
We're replacing it with real stories as fast as we can. The photos have always been real. Arrie Aslin's photographs, Chase's shots of the river and the town and the food — those are Natchez. Those are people who live here, places that exist, light that actually falls through those windows at that angle in the late afternoon.
The words are catching up.
We think that's worth saying out loud, because most companies would never tell you. They'd let you wonder. We'd rather you know, and we'd rather earn your trust by being the magazine that said "yeah, we used AI for some of this, and here's what we're doing about it" than the magazine that pretended everything was handwritten by candlelight.
Why This Matters
Here's why we're telling you the infrastructure number.
Every tech company in Silicon Valley is buying GPUs. They're spending billions on data centers and compute clusters and things that sound impressive in investor presentations. They're building AI for people who already have gigabit fiber and a MacBook Pro and a venture capitalist on speed dial.
We built ours with a $167/month bill and 1,425 businesses on Main Street.
If your tools cost $167 a month, you don't need investors. You don't need a Series A. You don't need to "scale" before you can pay your bills. You can start with the town you're in and the people you know and the bourbon you're already pouring.
That changes what's possible.
A typical small business in the Deep South pays $500 to $800 a month for disconnected software tools they barely use. Yelp. Mailchimp. A website builder. A review management tool. A social media scheduler. An SEO tool nobody logs into. Six different subscriptions, six different logins, six different companies that have never heard of Natchez, Mississippi.
We replace all of that. Not because we're smarter than those companies. Because we're here. Because we eat at the restaurants we're listing. Because when a business owner's Google hours are wrong at 11 p.m. on a Saturday, we notice, because we just walked past and the lights were still on.
The Grocery Math
Think about it like groceries. You can drive forty-five minutes to a Walmart Supercenter and buy everything under one roof for less than you'd pay at six specialty stores. Or you can shop at the local market that knows your name and keeps the good tomatoes behind the counter for the people who ask.
We're the local market. The infrastructure is the thing that lets us exist at all — the cheap rent, the short supply chain, the fact that we don't have a marketing department because we are the marketing department. The $167 is the rent. What you get for it is a magazine, a radio station, a business directory, a touring company, and a bartender who knows your drink.
What We Spend the Rest On
If the infrastructure costs $167, the rest of the money goes where it should go. The music. The bourbon. The people.
Amy's pay. Tracy's pay. The bands. The Sprinter van diesel. The honey for the cocktails. The flowers Amy puts on the bar every morning. Arrie's film. The new strings for the house guitar.
That's the whole thesis. Technology should cost so little that you forget it's there. The expensive part should always be the human part — the taste, the ear, the instinct for which band sounds right on a Wednesday night in a room that holds forty people and a sky full of stars.
Every tech company tells you they're "democratizing" something. We're not democratizing anything. We're running a bar, a radio station, and a magazine for less than most people's car payment, and we're telling you exactly how so you can see for yourself whether what we're building is worth a damn.
We think it is. But we live here. Come see for yourself.
The Big Muddy Inn is at bigmuddyinn.com. Big Muddy Radio streams 24/7 at bigmuddyradio.com. This magazine is at bigmuddymagazine.com. All of it runs on the same $167.