Finances 2025
Hey y'all, it's been a while since I reported out anything from Racetrim. I'm still here, and still dreaming up things to do in 2026. It's tax season here in the USA, so I'm tallying up the final report on Racetrim's finances from the year 2025. This was my first year in business, I registered the racetrim.pro domain back in January 2025 and it's been a year beyond all my expectations. Most "startups" (if you can even call this that) don't ever make a single sale before they struggle to their death. I've been really fortunate to have at least a few regular customers who like the app.racetrim.pro site, and choose to run servers through us. However, it is definitely not enough to sustain a business. As I'll detail below, I operate at a fairly large loss even without counting my own labor costs to build the app.
2025 Cashflow
Things that are an outflow of money have the parentheses ($XX.XX), and the items without parentheses are income.
| 2025 | |
|---|---|
| AWS Costs | ($2,231.38) |
| Email+Domain | ($102.43) |
| Mail+Phone | ($76.56) |
| Coding tools | ($74.00) |
| Version control | ($50.00) |
| Discord | ($38.92) |
| Other expenses | ($108.21) |
| Server Revenue | $215.48 |
| Patreon Memberships | $163.64 |
| --------------------- | ------------- |
| Profit/Loss | ($2302.38) |
I spent $2681.50 to run the Racetrim app, database, infrastructure, discord, and other things necessary to form a legitimate business, and brought in $379.12 in memberships and revenue. Overall that is a net operations loss of $2302.38 in the year 2025. Again, this is not putting a monetary value on my time to develop, market, and support the business (if you can call it that).
2026 What's next?
I'm not yet giving up on this whole idea! Mostly because I have fun building it, and enjoy providing a service to global sim-racers. I will make serious changes to how servers are rented on app.racetrim.pro though. I am planning to overhaul the server rental system to operate on a pay-as-you-go model, where a user will have full control to turn on and off their servers as they see fit. No longer would you run a server 24/7 for a month, but you would instead run your server at an hourly rate during the hours you choose to have it on. My hypothesis is that this will actually end up cutting down unutilized server time and monthly spend for my customers, while also allowing me to charge a slightly marked-up rate above what AWS charges me to run servers. We'll see when I can squeeze in the time to develop this overhaul; I'm not even guessing at when I'll have it done.
When it is done though, I'll invite everyone in the Racetrim community who wants to see this app succeed, to help share the word to ACC players in one last big marketing push. If I can get it to where a person can run a server for 20 hours a month, and that's not actually a net loss for me on the backend, maybe there's a chance that enough people will do that and help cover a portion of what it takes to run the app.
Thanks everyone for a wonderful 2025, all the fun, all the laughs, and all the racing!