How much USD did I spend as a Chinese Programmer

I regret some expenses, and I will continue to spend others in 2024.

As I Chinese programmer, I enjoy working online. Most of my side hustles are based on English Internet. I earn & spend US dollars.

In this article, I will enumerate all the dollars I spent in 2023 and explain which expenses I regret, which products are extremely valuable, and which ones I plan to continue purchasing in 2024.

Since I live in China, all my daily expenses are in Chinese Yuan. Therefore, all the expenses listed below are related to working, freelancing, or programming.

Overview

I had spent $991.25 in 2023.

This is the distribution of my expenses:

 DELAWARE TAX  -450.00
 CHATGPT     -100.00
 STRIPE ATLAS   -100.00
 ERUDEN SHOP               -69.99
 MEDIUM       -115.00
 MIDJOURNEY.           -50.00
 REPLIT INC.               -20.00
 LD                        -15.00
 GITHUB.               -10.00
 OPENAI                    -10.00
 TWITTER     -8.00
 FIVERR                     -7.28
 BLIZZARD     -4.99
 ELEVENLABS            -1.00
 Payoneer  -29.99

Here is a link to my bill to prove my words.

Delaware Tax: $450.00 & Stripe Atlas: $100.00

There are many restrictions for non-Americans to start their business in America. For example, I can’t register a Stripe account as a Chinese. If you don’t have a Stripe account, then you can’t apply Medium Partner Program.

As I know, many Indian writers are also facing this trouble.

So, I decided to register a US Corporation in 2020 through Stripe Atlas.

The United States is indeed a country with a very strong business culture and is very friendly to business activities. I am a Chinese and have never been to the United States, but I legally registered an American company remotely. The registration process is very convenient, even more convenient than registering a company in China.

I got many benefits from this Corporation entity. At least, I register a Stripe account with this entity.

GPTs Store’s revenue-sharing program will soon be open to Americans, but I believe I can use this U.S. corporate entity to join the program.

But also, it’s very expensive. Every year, I have to pay Stripe $100 for the use of a business address, and then pay Delaware $450 for the franchise tax.

115$ On Medium Membership

I love Medium, and Medium is the best text-based content platform. I learned too much knowledge from these articles.

But, wait, isn’t Medium membership only cost 50$ per year? How did I spend 115$?

Because I had paid 65$ for my friends. I have recommended Medium to many guys from China, but some of them don’t have a USD credit card. So I paid this money for them.

100$ On ChatGPT Plus

Undoubtedly, ChatGPT has been one of the great inventions in the last year. Since GPT4 was released, I started subscribing to ChatGPT Plus.

Based on my experience, ChatGPT is very useful when you are involved in text or coding work. However, once you step outside these two types of tasks, ChatGPT doesn’t have much to offer.

Has anyone really used ChatGPT to plan their travel or treatment plans? There was a period when I was preoccupied with real-life matters and briefly stopped working, so I canceled ChatGPT for a while.

Now, that I have started developing GPTs, I will definitely not cancel ChatGPT Plus in 2024.

MidJourney: $50.00

MidJourney is a great AI tool for image generation. It truly shock me. So I paid their subscription for 5 months.

However, since DALLE was integrated into ChatGPT, it fulfilled my needs. To save dollars, I decided to cancel MidJourney.

It’s not that MidJourney is not cool enough, but that ChatGPT is more cost-effective

10$ On OpenAI API keys

In comparison to ChatGPT, developers also need to GPT API. I spent 10$ on it.

However, currently, I haven’t found any particularly suitable software for utilizing large language models, so I haven’t spent much money on this.

$20 On Replit

Community

Your place to share and discover Repls

replit.com

Replit is a website where you can write, test, and deploy your code.

The benefit of using Replit:

Set a development environment in the browser to avoid cumbersome setups. Goodbye, Python virtual environment!
Integrated AI Assistant
Deploy your web app with only one click

I have published a GitHub OAuth tutorial. In this project, I’m using Replit to deploy it.

It’s so useful! It’s a pity for me that I only discovered this software in December 2023. So I only spend 20$ for it’s subscription.

If everything goes as expected, I will spend $240 on this platform in 2024.

GitHub Copilot $10.00

Undoubtedly, GitHub Copilot is extremely useful for developers. I can’t image life without an AI coding assistant.

But I still cancel my GitHub Copilot subscription.

Why?

Because I have a better choice.

For those context-free coding assistant, I can ask ChatGPT. For those context-related coding tasks, I can ask Replit AI.

ChatGPT + ReplitAI can fulfill my needs, so I canceled GitHub Copilot to save my dollars.

$4.99 Hearthstone Pocket

I was a hard player of Hearthstone in my university time. This year, I returned to the game and spent a tiny money to buy some discount card pockets.

But overall, I’m not too willing to spend much money on video games. Well, it depends on each person’s philosophy of life.

VPN: $69.99

There is a joke:

Chinese programmers take their privacy very seriously, as everyone is using VPNs!

It's not true. We are using VPNs because Google, YouTube, Medium, and many other websites are banned in China.

To use Google and Medium, I have to pay 69$ for VPN service.

ElevenLabs.IO: $1.00

I was planning to create some YouTube videos, but I suck at English speaking. So I wanted to use some voice-generation tools for my video.

I tried ElevenLab, and it’s amazingly good! So I purchased its subscription. Their subscription service costs only 1 dollar for the first month.

But later, I decided to not use any AI voice and canceled my subscription

Why?

Because I believe that readers need real voices!

AI voices might be more accurate and smooth, but they create a barrier between the creator and the reader, distancing one from the other. Readers wish to interact with a real person, not a robot or someone behind a mask. Ultimately, I decided to train my pronunciation and start using my real voice!

Twitter Premium: $8.00

After Elon refactored some features of Twitter and provided a monthly subscription plan, I wanted to try it.

But to be honest, I didn’t get much value from the subscription. 5$ on Medium is much more worthy than 8$ on Twitter.

After one month's subscription, I quit it.

Fiverr: $7.28

At the beginning of 2023, I spent $7.28 to have an artist on Fiverr create an image for me.

Frankly speaking, I am not satisfied with the effect.

However, in the future, I probably won’t purchase such services again because I now have MidJourney and DALL-E.

For ordinary people, DALL-E and MidJourney can fully meet our needs.

If you’re an artist, you should feel a sense of crisis.

Murf.AI: $0.00 (Paid it and Got a Refund)

This is also a voice generation tool, but I feel it’s not as good as ElevenLab. Moreover, I don’t intend to use AI voices anymore, so after trying it once, I chose to get a refund.

LD: $15.00

I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten what this expense was for.

Payoneer Maintenance fee 29.99

I applied for a debit card from Payoneer, a fintech company. And they charge 29.99 per year.

Which one is worth it?

Here is a personal opinion:

Thank you for reading here. I have some questions:

How much money did you spend in 2023 as a programmer or freelancer?
What other websites are worth paying for?

Summarize