Every morning, I get exactly one hour with my family. Then I sit down at my monitor, open the dashboards, and watch my startup burn through another $290 like clockwork.
My name is Denis. I'm building Web3 infrastructure solo, torching nearly $9,000 a month out of my own pocket, working two jobs just to cover those bills, and right now I'm at a crossroads.
Let me back up. How did I end up here?
Thirteen years in development, eight of them in fintech: crypto exchanges, NFT marketplaces, launchpads. At some point I realized something: every project, we were writing payment processing from scratch. The logic kept getting more polished, the code more universal. And I thought: if this is solving my problem, it's probably solving the market's too.
But thinking and doing aren't the same thing. The trigger was Day X. My main job hit a hard crisis, and I was told in no uncertain terms that my firing was a matter of when, not if. The ground went out from under me. Sure, I went on autopilot and updated my resume on every job board, but something clicked inside. I was tired of depending on other people's decisions, tired of waiting for someone to show me the door. I decided: time to build my own thing.
My initial startup plan was as safe as I could make it: ship an RPC Gateway. Build a dashboard, a load balancer, a soft cache, geo-routing to existing providers. A clear product with clear demand.
And then came the lunch that changed everything.
I was meeting with an acquaintance. One thing led to another, and I mentioned my infrastructure project in passing.
He perked up:
"Hey, do you have a crypto processing solution?"
My heart started pounding. My palms went traitorously sweaty. I felt a wave of gratitude that this chance had even landed in my lap.
"Yes," I said, "but the product is still raw. Give me a couple of months."
They agreed.
What followed was a blur. A personal two-month hackathon. I wrote code 16 hours a day, breaking only to shovel down food and grab a few hours of sleep. The project shipped. The docs went over to their tech team.
But once they had a taste, they wanted more. They came back asking for Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Dogecoin. I couldn't find an RPC provider that could handle the load I needed. I had to spin up my own nodes.
And that's where the first cold shower hit.
Remember, I was routing requests through external providers. My architecture parsed every block looking for transactions, checked for reorgs, constantly polled for the highest node. That perfectionism came with a bill. Every day, a $100 invoice landed in my inbox. Every. Single. Day. And that was just for third-party RPC calls. On top of that, a massive Digital Ocean bill for the droplets running my own nodes.
Seeing numbers like that as a solo founder is terrifying. I realized that under real traffic, this approach would drown me.
Emergency move to dedicated servers. After running the rejection gauntlet — thanks for nothing, Hetzner — I found my home at OVH. Hunting down archive snapshots and syncing nodes across regions took two grueling weeks. But now I had the perfect stack — one that could chew through massive traffic.
Infrastructure buttoned up. Servers humming. I send the team a triumphant message: "We're ready, let's roll!"
And the reply comes back:
"Hey, our focus shifted to another project. We need to put this on hold."
Picture that feeling. You've squeezed yourself completely dry, haven't seen your family in two months. Your servers are still eating money by the second, your MRR is zero, and they're telling you: "wait."
I've been waiting three months now.
Why even step into this bloodbath when the market already has giants? Great question. And the answer is my manifesto.
I'm building a system with no revenue cut and a non-custodial design.
I think taking a cut of transactions on an infrastructure product is highway robbery. My monetization is built entirely on API tokens, billed per call. You pay for the infrastructure you use, not a slice of your business.
Non-custodial means your money never passes through my wallets. The payment goes directly from the payer to you. I run the infrastructure, I don't touch the funds. No counterparty risk, no frozen accounts, and if my project goes down tomorrow, your money isn't affected.
The first days after the client backed off, I was numb. But I couldn't just sit there and watch my savings evaporate. I started knocking on every old door, working my network the hard way. I pulled out another client — a startup that needs processing too. They're early stage, haven't moved to integration yet, but it's a real lead, one I had to fight for.
At the same time, I hired an SEO team. You're asking: why drop $1,800 a month on SEO when money is already on fire? It's just math. Competition in Web3 is brutal. Running paid ads cold means torching the rest of my budget in a few days for nothing. SEO is the long game, but it's my only shot at organic warm leads in this niche.
So, the harsh reality in numbers. Where the money goes each month:
DO - $2,018.65
OVH - $3,625.20
SEO team - $1,800.00
Subscriptions (email, AI, automation) - $549.00
Assistant's salary - $838.00
Total: ~$8,830 every single month.
Right now I'm living in agony. I keep working my main job just to cover basic needs and pay the server bills. I see my family for one hour in the morning. My personal savings will last exactly 2 more months of this race.
I wrote this in hopes it would reach people who've been through this same meat grinder. I know the value of what I've built, but my back is starting to give out under the weight.
What would you do in my place? I've got three options on the table:
- Kill the project. Shut down the servers, take the loss, and forget the whole thing like a bad dream. Go back to a normal life and start seeing my wife and kids again.
- White-knuckle it. Squeeze out every last drop, trying to make it to the moment the clients finally integrate, hunting for new partners with my hair on fire.
- Find an investor. Trade equity for cash to fuel marketing, a sustainable pace, and a way to take the choke chain off my finances. Sounds like the best option — until you bump into the fact that I have no idea where or how to find an investor in this niche, or how long that whole process would even take. And when the horizon is undefined while my savings melt on a timer, that road becomes its own race against time.
Drop your thoughts in the comments. Any criticism welcome.
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