Xe's blog made $2564.42 in profit last year

My tax situation is complicated. Thanks to all of your efforts, it is now even more complicated. I was running all of the number from last year, and in the process I have discovered that this blog makes a profit. This is astounding.

Really, thanks for all of the support that you all have given me. It is a very unique feeling, and it's comforting to know that should I hit rough times I won't have to worry about keeping the lights on.

This article is going to contain some breakdowns of how much I've made and spent keeping the lights on.

Income vs profit

Here is the breakdown of income by each income stream for 2022:

(All amounts are US dollars)

This is more money than I could have ever imagined a single person's blog could get. This is an entire paycheck's worth of income and it's more than enough to have the blog not only pay for itself, but I make a profit. Here's a breakdown of the expenses that I incur for not only this blog, but all of my personal infrastructure:

(All amounts are US dollars)

This means that my total profit is just over 2.5 grand. This is astounding. My blog is officially my most profitable side project ever.

I have cut out Cloudflare and I don't expect to spend more on Anbernic this year. I'm also considering downsizing the server that my main blog runs on and moving all the other stuff it does to fly.io and Funnel to cut out a huge amount of monthly spend. There is a lot of room for cutting things out in other places, I'm pretty sure I could cut out almost all of my Digital Ocean spend, and most of my Vultr spend could easily also head to fly.io and Funnel.

<Cadey> I really wish I wasn't locked out of my Digital Ocean account though. Support has been unhelpful and I don't know what legacy infrastructure I have in that account so I can either upgrade it, cut it off, or move it elsewhere. Please help.

Video game spend

When I ran these numbers, I also wanted to figure out if a joke I was telling on stream was true: all of the excess Patreon money goes towards my crippling video game addiction. I imported all of my invoices from the Nintendo eShop and Steam into my spreadsheet (minus my Steam Deck) and I ended up with this figure:

(All amounts are US dollars, the Steam values were converted by machine at the time of calculation, facts and circumstances can and will differ)

This means that I spend about 76% of my blog's profit on video games. It's pretty great to have my blog pay for my entire gaming habit!

<Mara> Do those numbers make sense? Is something not being converted to USD from CAD? The Steam number seems a bit high...

<Cadey> I'm pretty sure the numbers were correctly converted from CAD to USD, if this is wrong, then I only spent about $927.40 on Steam last year (a lot of the increased price is because games are more expensive in Canada due to HST and GST being higher than sales tax typically is in the US, combined with currency conversion fees baked into the price). This would make the total just over half of the net profit.

Thanks for all of the reading and sharing you do, it really helps a lot. I've been working on new and interesting things (such as a longer article that explains why I think WASI is cool with interactive examples) and I hope you'll enjoy them. Let's see what 2023 will bring!

<Cadey> If I ever incorporate for simplifying the tax situation of all of my side income, I am going to have to invoice myself to pay for video games that I reference on the blog or on stream. This is a very surreal thing to think about.