A good full stack developer is paid $150,000+. A normal VC funded startup probably has 5 engineers. That's $750,000/y. Add some marketing people and you're close to $1,000,000/y in labor costs.

Hosting and bandwidth is relatively cheap but still gets to $12,000/year including backup storage and backup servers.

To make the site fast we pay $48,000/year to Cloudflare. You need regular security people to check your server and avoid it getting hacked, which is another $24,000/year.

Using Mapbox's APIs for geocoding and showing maps is not free and costs about $6,000/year for our usage.

Using email APIs for sending emails is not free and costs about $12,000/year for our usage.

We pay $50,000/year for APIs to collect data about places around the world. For example, the daily weather conditions, air quality and internet speeds in thousands of cities.

That means Nomads.com would not be able to exist if it was a regular startup. It'd lose money.