Quote · Starter Story

I built a $14K/month SaaS using Discord | Starter Story

Explore episode Sep 10, 2026

You need to initially bet on yourself, think that, okay, cool, I'm going to have 100,000 users building my tool. And you want to have the frameworks behind that and you might not know them, but when you tell Cursor to think that way, it will change its mindset in the way it prompts you to do things.

Sam

I built a $14K/month SaaS using Discord…

Where this was said

Tech Stack and Running Costs

At 13:20 · chapter starts 12:40

Pat asks what's under the hood, and Sam answers with refreshing specificity. He's upgraded from Cursor's $20/month plan to the $200/month plan. AI image generation inside Algrow runs on a service he calls 'Nanabanana' at around $100/month. AI video generation uses Sora 2 for approximately $200/month. He's still on Heroku for hosting at $100/month. Email marketing via MailerLite costs $80/month. And general AI compute — primarily Gemini — runs between $300 and $500 per month^{[1]

— Sam

"Monthly infra costs ~$780–$980: Sam's monthly operating costs include Cursor ($200), AI image generation ($100), AI video generation ($200)…"

12:28}. Total: somewhere between $780 and $980 per month in operating costs against $14,000 in revenue, representing healthy margins for a six-month-old solo-built product.

Technology

Tell Cursor to Build for 100,000 Users

I built a $14K/month SaaS using Discord | Starter Story · Sep 10, 2026 Technology

Sam's top advice: when prompting Cursor, tell it to architect code for 100,000 users from day one. The AI changes its approach, building scalable frameworks instead of brittle one-user code.