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- We Spent $61,760 Building an App This Year. Here's Every Dollar.
We Spent $61,760 Building an App This Year. Here's Every Dollar.
We built an app for nurses this year. It cost us $61,760. We made $1,042 back. Here's the full breakdown—every expense, every mistake, and what we'd do differently.
Jason Nunez
December 21, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Most people don't talk about how much money they lose while building something.
We're going to.
Because if you've ever thought about starting a side project, building an app, or creating something beyond your 9-to-5—this is what it actually looks like. Not the highlight reel. The receipts.
The Backstory
You already know Monica and I are nurses. You know we moved from NYC to Sacramento. You know we paid off $128K in debt and started building wealth on nursing salaries.
What you might not know is we've been quietly building something on the side for the past year—a tool called Map My Pay.
It started because of a problem we saw over and over again: nurses making career decisions using the wrong numbers.
They'd compare $45/hr vs $55/hr and think the higher number wins. But that math ignores taxes, housing costs, and what you actually keep at the end of the month.
So we decided to build a tool that answers one question: Where do you keep the most money as a nurse after taxes and housing?
The Numbers (All of Them)
Here's exactly how much we spent building Map My Pay in 2025:
Metric | Amount |
Total Operating Expenses | $61,760.64 |
Total Sales Revenue | $1,042.84 |
Net Loss | -$60,717.80 |
Average Monthly Burn | $5,204.38 |
Total Capital Raised | $83,995.00 |
Yes, you're reading that right. We spent $61,760 and made $1,042 back. That's a -$60,717 hole.
Where the Money Actually Went
Here's the breakdown by category:
Category | Total Spent | % of Total |
Contract Labor (Development) | $52,335.27 | 84.74% |
Software & SaaS | $5,427.06 | 8.79% |
Professional Fees | $1,272.19 | 2.06% |
Travel | $721.28 | 1.17% |
Everything Else | $2,004.84 | 3.24% |
The big takeaway: 84.74% of our spending went to developers. We weren't buying ads or chasing clout. We were paying people to write code and build the actual product.
The $40,000+ Mistake
Here's where it gets painful.
We made the classic first-time builder mistake: we tried to build a mobile app first.
Mobile apps are slower to build. Harder to change. More expensive to iterate on. A smarter move would have been to build a simple website first, test features quickly, learn what nurses actually click and use—then build the app once the product was proven.
Instead, we spent over $40,000 going down that road before accepting the truth: we needed to rebuild the foundation.
That meant switching our entire tech stack—from Laravel to Node.js and React. If you're not a developer, just know this: it's like realizing halfway through building a house that you poured the wrong kind of foundation. You can't just patch it. You have to start over.
Expensive lesson. But we learned it.
What We Actually Built
Go To MapMyPay.com
Map My Pay is a nurse pay and cost-of-living comparison tool that shows:
Salary data for nurses by city and hospital
What you'll actually pay in taxes
Rent vs mortgage costs in each location
What's left over after real life costs
It's meant to prevent bad moves—like relocating for a higher wage but losing money to housing, or taking a job offer without understanding the after-tax reality.
Why We're Telling You This
Because this newsletter has always been about honesty.
When we show you how to compare nursing salaries, we give you the actual numbers. When we talk about paying off debt, we tell you exactly how we did it—and what we got wrong. When we talk about building something from scratch, we're going to tell you the real cost.
Too many people online make it look easy. They show you the wins and hide the losses. That's not us.
We lost $60,717 this year building something we believe in. And we're still going.
What We Learned
Start simple. Build a website before building an app. Test fast. Learn faster.
Most of your cost will be labor. Subscriptions and tools are cheap. Paying people to build is expensive.
Revenue needs a plan, not hope. $1,042 in sales means we haven't figured out monetization yet. That's okay—but we can't ignore it forever.
Building the wrong thing costs more than building slowly. A $40K mistake is proof of that.
What's Next
We're still in build mode. The product isn't done. Revenue isn't funding development yet. We're financing progress out of pocket.
But that's how real things get built.
If you've ever thought about building something of your own—whether it's an app, a course, a side business, whatever—just know: it costs more than you think, takes longer than you expect, and you'll make mistakes you couldn't have predicted.
Do it anyway.
— Jason
Do you want to make more as a nurse?
I built the Nurses to Riches Accelerator to help you:
Relocate to Northern California the smart way
Secure a high-paying hospital job (we’re talking $200K+ a year)
Learn to calculate your real take-home pay
Work fewer hours—without sacrificing income
Start investing + paying off debt like a boss
I’ll even show you how to compare hospitals, filter by pay and shift type, and fast-track your move so you’re not spinning your wheels for another year.
Use code LOYALTY10 for 10% off the program
Weekly Update:
Watch our latest YouTube videos:
Go to Our Website, Map My Pay, so that you can compare nurse salaries and cost of living data across over 1000 US cities.
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