Solaces
In the open.
Solaces is free, anonymous peer support. Free only stays honest if you can see what it costs to keep alive. So here are the real numbers.
Last updated 30 September 2026
- Running cost last month
- £9.42
- Conversations since launch
- 624
- Cost per conversation
- about 1.5p
- Paid by the people using it
- £0
Last month's bill, line by line
- The database, which holds every chat, note and setting£8.80
- AI safety checks on messages, billed per use£0.51
- Live chat updates, so messages arrive as they are sent£0.06
- Data going back and forth, sounds and pictures included£0.03
- Small background jobs that wake, do one job and sleep£0.02
- Total£9.42
Nearly all of it is the database. The AI, the part people assume must be expensive, came to about fifty pence.
Not in that bill
- £79 a year to Apple for the developer account that gets the iPhone app into the App Store.
- The AI I build with, mostly Claude Code. It costs the same whether ten people show up or ten thousand, so it sits on the building side, not the running side.
- My time. Nothing is coming in yet.
What stays true
- Free to use. No subscription and no premium tier with the good bits locked away.
- No adverts, and no data sold.
- No hard cap. If growth ever outran the budget, the first move would be to find the money, not to switch people off.
Where it's at
- On the App Store for iPhone
- Live on the web at solaces.live
- Android coming soon
