I started my tech blog without a plan. It was a place to document projects, vent about broken toolchains, and share the kind of tutorials I wished I had found when I was learning. Traffic was a trickle for the first year. Then a few articles got picked up by newsletters and search engines, and suddenly the site was pulling ten thousand visits a month. That number sounds impressive to people outside the blogging world. Inside, it is a strange middle ground: too big to be a hobby, too small to be a full time business. I have now run the blog at this level for over a year, and I have tracked every dollar that goes out and every dollar that comes in. This is an honest breakdown of the real costs, the real revenue, and the uncomfortable math of running a content site that is not quite a startup and not quite a pastime.
Why I Am Sharing This
Most income reports online fall into two categories. Either the author is making life changing money and selling a course, or they are padding numbers to impress sponsors. I am doing neither. My blog makes enough to cover its costs and leave a modest surplus. I keep it running because I enjoy writing and because the small income is a nice validation. But I want to show the unglamorous reality for the majority of site owners in the ten thousand monthly visit range. The data here is from my own tracking spreadsheet and payment receipts. Nothing is projected or rounded for drama. I have included the time cost as well, because time is the one resource you can never get back.
The Infrastructure Costs
The blog runs on a single VPS that I manage myself. I pay twenty four dollars a month for a droplet with four gigabytes of RAM and two vCPUs. I could use a cheaper shared host or a static site, but I value the control. I run the site on WordPress with a caching plugin, and the server handles ten thousand visits without breaking a sweat. The domain costs fifteen dollars a year, which works out to a dollar and twenty five cents a month. I use a paid email service for a custom address at the domain, which is six dollars a month. Email deliverability matters, and the free tiers were unreliable. I also use a content delivery network for images and static assets, which is free at my traffic level thanks to Cloudflare’s generous tier. So the base infrastructure runs me thirty one dollars and twenty five cents a month. That is the floor. The blog cannot exist for less than that without sacrificing speed or reliability.
The Software and Service Stack
Beyond the server, there are tools I pay for to keep the blog running and to improve its quality. I use a premium SEO plugin that costs eighty nine dollars a year, or about seven forty per month. It helps with structured data, sitemaps, and on page analysis. I use a social media scheduling tool to share articles on Twitter and LinkedIn, which costs ten dollars a month. I tried doing this manually, but the consistency dropped off and traffic suffered. I also pay for a grammar and style checker at twelve dollars a month. My writing is decent, but I make embarrassing mistakes when I am tired. This tool catches most of them before I hit publish. I subscribe to a stock photo service for twelve dollars a month, though I use it sparingly. Finally, I run a newsletter that goes out to about five hundred subscribers. The email marketing platform costs twenty dollars a month at my list size, and I absorb that cost because the newsletter drives repeat visits and builds audience loyalty. The total for software and services comes to about sixty one dollars and forty cents a month, though I rounded the SEO plugin to seven forty for the calculation. The real number fluctuates a dollar or two based on annual renewals.
The Hidden Cost of Writing and Editing
I write every article myself. I do not pay for content, and I do not use AI to generate posts. But time is a real cost, and ignoring it makes any profit calculation dishonest. I spend an average of six hours per article, including research, drafting, editing, formatting, and creating the occasional diagram. I publish eight articles a month. That is forty eight hours of writing and editing, equivalent to a full workweek plus overtime. If I were to value my time at a modest freelance rate of thirty dollars an hour, the monthly labor cost would be one thousand four hundred and forty dollars. I do not actually pay myself that. The blog is a labor of love. But I keep the number in my head to remind myself that revenue is not profit. The true cost is the time I could be spending on consulting, open source, or rest. If I were trying to make a living from the blog, I would need to at least match that opportunity cost, which is far beyond the current revenue.
The Revenue Breakdown: AdSense, Affiliates, and the Occasional Donation
Now for the part everyone asks about. How much does a ten thousand visit blog actually earn? My primary income source is Google AdSense. The site is in the tech niche, which has moderate cost per click. In an average month, I earn between one hundred fifty and two hundred ten dollars from ads. The RPM, revenue per thousand impressions, hovers around eight to twelve dollars depending on seasonality and advertiser demand. January and February are weaker. October and November are stronger. I optimize ad placements sparingly because I hate sites where the content is buried under pop ups. My ad setup is a single banner in the sidebar and one in content unit after the first paragraph. It is not aggressive, and it likely leaves money on the table, but I prefer a readable site over a few extra dollars.
I also have affiliate partnerships with a few tools and services I genuinely use and recommend. These include hosting providers, developer tools, and books. Affiliate income is wildly inconsistent. Some months it brings in forty dollars. Other months it brings in over a hundred. I have never had a month where affiliate income exceeded AdSense, and the average is around seventy dollars. I do not chase affiliate programs. If I recommend something, it is because I have used it and can describe its strengths and weaknesses honestly. That approach earns less, but it preserves trust.
There is a small trickle from direct support. I have a “Buy Me a Coffee” link at the bottom of each article. Some readers send a few dollars as thanks for a tutorial that helped them. This adds up to about twenty dollars a month. It is not a business model, but it is meaningful. The total average monthly revenue across all sources is around two hundred sixty dollars. The range is two hundred to three hundred twenty dollars, depending on the month.
The Net Calculation and the Surprising Profit
Subtract the infrastructure cost of thirty one dollars and the software cost of sixty one dollars from the average revenue of two hundred sixty dollars, and the blog nets about one hundred sixty eight dollars a month. That is real money. It covers a nice dinner out, a few subscriptions, and a small deposit into savings. But divide that by the forty eight hours I spend writing each month, and the effective hourly rate is about three dollars and fifty cents. That number is a reality check. I run the blog for reasons that are not financial: the joy of writing, the community, the record of my learning. If I were doing it purely for money, I would be better off picking up freelance coding work. I suspect most small bloggers have a similar hourly rate, and we rarely admit it. The small profit keeps the project self-sustaining, which is more than many hobbies can claim, but it does not pay the rent.
The Unexpected Benefits That Do Not Show on a Spreadsheet
The revenue and cost numbers are clear. What the spreadsheet cannot capture is the blog’s role as a career asset. Several consulting clients found me through articles I wrote. They read a technical piece, contacted me, and hired me at my full freelance rate. Two conference talks and one workshop invitation came directly from blog posts. If I attribute even a fraction of that consulting income to the blog, the effective return is far higher than the AdSense check suggests. I also learn more deeply when I write about a topic. The act of explaining forces me to fill gaps in my understanding. Those gaps might have cost me hours of confusion in my paid work. The blog is a continuous investment in my own expertise, and that investment compounds over time. For anyone in tech, a blog is not just a content site. It is a public learning log and a magnet for opportunities. The monetary return on that front is impossible to calculate precisely, but it dwarfs the ad revenue.
What I Would Do Differently If Starting Over
If I could go back to the day I started the blog, I would change a few financial decisions. I would have used a static site generator from the beginning instead of WordPress. The VPS cost is manageable, but a static site hosted on a free tier or a cheap object storage bucket would cut the infrastructure bill to near zero. I would also have started collecting email addresses on day one. I waited two years to build a newsletter, and those missing years represent a lot of lost subscriber growth. Email subscribers convert to regular readers far more reliably than search traffic. I would also have been more strategic about affiliate content. Not in a slimy way, but by writing detailed comparisons and tutorials around tools I already used. Those articles tend to have higher affiliate conversion and longer search lifespan. I wrote a lot of personal essay content that I loved, but it did not generate revenue. A mix of evergreen practical posts and occasional personal pieces would have balanced passion and profit better.
The Reality of Ten Thousand Visits
Ten thousand monthly visits is an audience to be proud of. It is also a reminder that ad supported content alone is rarely a viable full time income unless the numbers are an order of magnitude higher. The economics of small blogs work as a side income, a portfolio piece, and a source of serendipity. They do not work as a salary replacement. I am at peace with that. I write because I would write anyway, and the small income makes the infrastructure free. My advice to other bloggers is to track your costs honestly, including your time, and to value the non-monetary returns. The real cost of running a tech blog is not the dollars. It is the hours, and those hours must be repaid in joy, learning, or opportunity. If they are, the spreadsheet barely matters. If they are not, no amount of AdSense revenue can justify the drain. My blog pays for itself, both financially and personally. That is the only profit that matters to me, and I hope this report helps you set realistic expectations for your own.
