Cost Estimation & Budget

Monthly Cost Breakdown

Hackathon / Development Phase (0 users)

Service	Plan	Cost
Railway (backend)	Hobby	$5/month
Supabase	Free	$0
OpenRouter	Pay per use	~$5-10
Google Places API	Free tier	$0 (< $200 credit)
Google STT	Free tier	$0 (< 60 min/month)
Firebase	Free Spark	$0
Upstash Redis	Free	$0
Total		~$10-15/month

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Growth Phase (1,000 active users)

Service	Usage	Cost
Railway (backend)	Pro plan	$20/month
Supabase	Pro	$25/month
OpenRouter (Gemini 1.5 Pro)	~50K queries × $0.003	~$150/month
Google Places API	10K requests	~$32/month
Google STT API	500 hours	~$180/month
Firebase (FCM)	Free	$0
Total		~$407/month

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Scale Phase (10,000 active users)

Service	Cost
Railway / Render (2x instances)	$80/month
Supabase Pro	$25/month
OpenRouter	~$800/month
Google APIs	~$500/month
CDN (Cloudflare)	Free
Total	~$1,400/month

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Cost Optimization Strategies

1. Cache AI responses (Redis)
   - Identical transcripts → return cached result
   - Saves ~30-40% OpenRouter cost

2. Use Gemini Flash for simple tasks
   - Flash costs 20x less than Pro
   - Use Flash for: news categorization, simple Q&A
   - Use Pro only for: civic extraction, law Q&A

3. Batch STT processing
   - Group audio uploads → process in batch
   - Saves API call overhead

4. Rate limit per user
   - Free: 50 AI queries/month
   - Premium: unlimited
   - Prevents single user from draining budget

5. Cache map tiles
   - OpenStreetMap is FREE
   - Cache on device → zero map tile cost

6. Free STT first
   - Use flutter_speech_to_text (device) by default
   - Only fallback to Google STT if accuracy < threshold
   - Saves ~60% STT cost

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Revenue Model (Future)

Phase 1 (now): Free, grant-funded / competition
Phase 2: Freemium
  - Free: 50 reports/month, basic features
  - Premium: ৳199/month = unlimited + priority support
Phase 3: B2B
  - Government department dashboards
  - NGO/INGO civic monitoring tools
Phase 4: API
  - Sell NagrikAI API to other civic apps
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