Complete cost transparency — every dollar accounted for, every dollar beyond costs funds freedom.
These costs are shared openly because transparency matters. All revenue from The Trinity Beast subscriptions goes directly to the Cross Power Ministries of Pakistan (CPMP) bank account in Pakistan. Cory Dean Kalani, as the Administrator and Sole Support for all US operations, is reimbursed for the technology infrastructure costs listed below, plus a 10% administration fee on net revenue after technology fees. Every dollar beyond operating costs funds freedom from brick kiln debt bondage in Pakistan.
Complete financial pipeline from donor/subscriber to mission impact. Every dollar is accounted for at every stage.
flowchart TD
%% Sources
A["🙏 Gifts
(One-time giving)"] --> S["💳 Stripe
Payment Processing"]
B["📡 Subscriptions
(Trinity Beast API tiers)"] --> S
%% Stripe to CPMP
S -->|"Payout (minus Stripe fees)"| C["🏦 CPMP Bank Account
Pakistan"]
%% Invoice from Cory to CPMP
D["📋 Cory Dean Kalani
USA Operations"] -->|"Monthly Invoice"| C
%% Invoice breakdown
D --- INV["📄 Invoice Breakdown:
• Total Payout received
• Stripe processing fees
• Per-impact totals (Water, Freedom,
Provisions, Medical, etc.)
• AWS infrastructure costs
• Net = Payout − Stripe Fees − AWS
• 10% Administration Fee on Net"]
%% CPMP pays invoice
C -->|"Invoice Payment"| E["🏦 Cory Dean Kalani
CPMP Operations Account
(USA)"]
%% What Cory receives
E --> F["☁️ AWS Costs
Reimbursement"]
E --> G["📊 10% Administration Fee
USA Operations & Support"]
%% Mission impact
C -->|"Remaining Funds"| H["✨ Mission Impact
Freedom · Water · Medical
Provisions · Education · Bibles"]
%% Styling
style A fill:#10b981,stroke:#059669,color:#fff
style B fill:#FF9900,stroke:#cc7a00,color:#fff
style S fill:#635bff,stroke:#4b44cc,color:#fff
style C fill:#60a5fa,stroke:#3b82f6,color:#fff
style D fill:#f59e0b,stroke:#d97706,color:#fff
style E fill:#f59e0b,stroke:#d97706,color:#fff
style F fill:#a855f7,stroke:#7c3aed,color:#fff
style G fill:#a855f7,stroke:#7c3aed,color:#fff
style H fill:#10b981,stroke:#059669,color:#fff
style INV fill:#f8fafc,stroke:#94a3b8,color:#1e293b
| Step | From | To | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Givers & Subscribers | Stripe | All giving and subscriptions are processed through Stripe Payment Links and Checkout Sessions. |
| 2 | Stripe | CPMP Bank (Pakistan) | Stripe pays out collected funds (minus processing fees) directly to the CPMP bank account in Pakistan. |
| 3 | Cory Dean Kalani | CPMP | Monthly invoice submitted showing: total payout, Stripe fees, per-impact-type totals, AWS infrastructure costs, and the 10% administration fee on net revenue. |
| 4 | CPMP Bank (Pakistan) | Cory Dean Kalani (USA) | CPMP pays the invoice to a dedicated bank account used exclusively for CPMP operations. |
| 5 | Invoice Payment | Cory Dean Kalani | Reimbursement for AWS infrastructure costs + 10% administration fee for USA operations and technical support. |
Key Point: Cory Dean Kalani receives passive income from CPMP as compensation for administration of all CPMP technical operations — infrastructure management, deployment, monitoring, development, and ongoing support. The 10% administration fee is calculated on net revenue (total incoming minus Stripe fees minus AWS costs).
Final billed amounts for July 2026 — the leanest month yet. The entire document library was re-translated this month for a total AI spend of just $27, with the Anthropic (Claude) portion under $7 — the bulk of translation ran on Qwen 3 235B via Bedrock. First full month with the ElastiCache reserved node gone (cancellation confirmed, $266.62 credit received). No one-time costs, no legacy charges.
| Category | Description | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Infrastructure | ECS Fargate, Aurora, ElastiCache, ALB, NLB, VPC, CloudWatch, WAF, S3, Lambda, Route 53, CloudFront, ECR, SQS, Secrets Manager, GuardDuty, SES, Support, Tax | $1,575 |
| Bedrock AI — API | Qwen 3 235B — document translation + AutoOps threat analysis + Rhema support + daily/weekly digests | $20 |
| Bedrock AI — Marketplace | Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) — translation engine | $7 |
| AWS Total — July 2026 | $1,603 | |
| Kiro AI IDE | Kiro Power subscription — $200/mo base + tax, within allocation (billed separately via Stripe) | $212 |
| Grand Total — July 2026 | $1,815 | |
Full library translation for under $30 in AI. The custom Bedrock pipeline — Qwen 3 235B for the heavy lifting, minimal Claude Sonnet 4.6 — translated the complete document set at a fraction of what a commercial translation service or a Claude-only pipeline would cost. May's translation push (largely Claude) ran $1,690 in Bedrock AI; July did comparable work for $27. Down 29% overall from June, and the true steady-state baseline is now confirmed at ~$1,800 all-in.
June was the first clean month on right-sized infrastructure (2 vCPU / 6 GB containers). MemoryDB reserved node cancellation approved — $348/month permanently eliminated plus $266.62 retroactive credit applied to May. Translation engine at steady-state Bedrock volume ($558 Marketplace).
| Category | Description | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Infrastructure | ECS Fargate, Aurora, ElastiCache, ALB, NLB, VPC, CloudWatch, WAF, S3, Lambda, Route 53, CloudFront, ECR, SQS, Secrets Manager, Support | $1,729 |
| Bedrock AI (Marketplace) | Translation engine (Claude Sonnet 4.6, Qwen 3 235B), AutoOps threat analysis, Rhema support, digests | $558 |
| AWS Total — June 2026 | $2,286 | |
| Kiro AI IDE | Development environment (billed separately) | $261 |
| Grand Total — June 2026 | $2,547 | |
Running ledger of actual billed amounts. Each month tells a story — infrastructure stabilized, one-time investments completed, steady-state achieved.
| Month | AWS | Kiro | Total | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| July 2026 | $1,603 | $212 | $1,815 | Leanest month — full library re-translated for $27 AI (Anthropic under $7), ElastiCache RI cancellation confirmed + $266.62 credit |
| June 2026 | $2,286 | $261 | $2,547 | First clean month — MemoryDB eliminated, right-sized infra, steady-state Bedrock ($558 Marketplace) |
| May 2026 | $5,419 | $622 | $6,041 | Translation push (407 docs), AWS Translate ($727 one-time), MemoryDB dead ($359) |
| April 2026 | $1,993 | $272 | $2,264 | 17 stress test runs, architecture development, 8 vCPU / 32 GB (pre-right-sizing) |
Trend: July is the leanest month on record and confirms the true steady-state baseline at ~$1,800 all-in. Down 29% from June, driven by two things: the ElastiCache reserved node is fully gone (cancellation confirmed, $266.62 credit received — the last piece of legacy dead weight), and the full document-library re-translation ran on Qwen 3 235B for just $27 in total AI spend — versus the $1,690 Bedrock bill May's Claude-heavy translation push produced. The Anthropic (Claude) portion this month was under $7. Operational AI (translation + AutoOps threat analysis + Rhema support + daily/weekly digests) is now a rounding error on the bill rather than a line item.
Visual breakdown of estimated ongoing monthly costs (post-July 2026 Serverless migration). Aurora remains the largest after-savings line item, followed by Bedrock AI (Marketplace), ECS Fargate (over-covered by Savings Plans), development tooling, support, and the cache layer — now dramatically reduced by Serverless pricing.
Estimated monthly costs based on us-east-2 pricing. The "On-Demand" column shows what you'd pay without any commitments. The "You Pay" column reflects the net cost after all active savings plans are applied. ECS Fargate was right-sized from 8 vCPU / 32 GB to 2 vCPU / 6 GB on May 30, 2026. ElastiCache migrated to Serverless on July 2, 2026 — no reserved commitment, pay-per-use.
| Resource | Configuration | On-Demand | You Pay | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ECS Fargate (4 containers) | 4 × 2 vCPU / 6 GB, 24/7 (right-sized 2026-06) | $680 | $352 | −$328 |
| Aurora Serverless v2 (writer + reader) | 2–18 ACU, avg ~6 ACU total (Optimized I/O) | $701 | $592 | −$109 |
| ElastiCache | Serverless, Valkey 9.0, multi-AZ, auto-scaling | $637 | ~$45 | −$592 |
| ALB | Trinity-Beast-TCP-ALB + LCU | $30 | $30 | — |
| NLB | Trinity-Beast-UDP-NLB + NLCU | $25 | $25 | — |
| CloudWatch | Logs, metrics, 4 dashboards, 18 alarms | $15 | $15 | — |
| Route 53 | 5 DNS records (api, lrs, udp, www, root) | $3 | $3 | — |
| CloudFront | Global edge distribution, low traffic | $5 | $5 | — |
| WAF (CloudFront + ALB) | 2 Web ACLs, 10 managed rule groups, 2 rate-based rules | $15 | $15 | — |
| GuardDuty | Threat detection — VPC flow logs, CloudTrail, DNS analysis | $4 | $4 | — |
| Kiro AI IDE | Kiro Power plan — $200/mo base + tax (within allocation); AI-powered development environment | $200 | $200 | — |
| Other | S3, ECR, Lambda (receipt + queued-writer + email-sender), Secrets Manager (×2), EventBridge, SES, Translate | $5 | $5 | — |
| AutoOps (5 Layers) | 7 Lambdas (1770 MB), 6 EventBridge rules, Step Functions, Bedrock (Claude Sonnet 4.6), SNS, Anomaly Detection | $100 | $100 | — |
| SQS (Standard Queues) | trinity-beast-queued-usage-logs + trinity-beast-email-queue + trinity-beast-translation-queue — $0.40/million messages |
$1 | $1 | — |
| Total Estimated Monthly Cost | ~$1,852 | ~$1,533 | −$319/mo | |
Savings breakdown: ECS Fargate covered by two Compute Savings Plans ($0.63/hr 3-year + $0.09/hr 1-year). After the May 30 right-sizing (8 vCPU / 32 GB → 2 vCPU / 6 GB), the Compute Savings Plans now over-cover the smaller ECS footprint — the unused capacity is held in reserve and absorbs the first wave of any future scale-up at zero additional cost. Aurora covered by two Database Savings Plans ($0.111/hr + $0.45/hr, both 1-year). ElastiCache migrated to Serverless (July 2026) — pay-per-use pricing, no reserved commitment needed. All plans are No Upfront.
For ~$1,533/month (estimated, after right-sizing and Serverless migration — Savings Plans now over-cover the smaller ECS footprint, holding capacity in reserve for future scale-up), The Trinity Beast provides:
Migrated from MemoryDB db.r7g.2xlarge (primary + replica) at ~$2,383/month to ElastiCache cache.r7g.2xlarge (single node) at $637/month — saving $1,755/month ($21,060/year). Aurora is the source of truth; the cache layer is rebuilt by the nightly sync job in 16 seconds. No replica needed because cache loss is a performance event, not a data loss event. The MemoryDB reserved node commitment was successfully cancelled by AWS Support (Case 178032695500463, resolved July 1, 2026) — $348/month dead weight permanently eliminated, plus $266.62 retroactive credit applied.
Purchased a 3-year No Upfront reserved node for cache.r7g.2xlarge — reducing the hourly rate from $0.873 (on-demand) to $0.363 (reserved). Superseded by the Serverless migration (July 2026) and now fully cancelled. AWS Support approved cancellation of the reserved node (Reservation ID: ri-2026-04-28-16-40-37-233) effective July 3, 2026, confirmed July 14 (Case 178308914700959) — $348/month permanently eliminated plus a $266.62 partial-month credit received. Lesson learned: never purchase reserved nodes for infrastructure that may be restructured.
Migrated from ElastiCache cache.r7g.2xlarge (single node, $265/month reserved) to ElastiCache Serverless (Valkey 9.0, multi-AZ, auto-scaling) at ~$70/month pay-per-use — saving approximately $195/month ($2,340/year). The shift eliminates all node management, adds multi-AZ availability (99.99% SLA), and scales transparently with demand. No capacity planning, no node sizing, no reserved commitments. The cache role is unchanged — pure cache layer, rebuilt by the sync job in ~16 seconds. The reserved node from April 2026 is now excess cost pending cancellation.
Three savings plans purchased during initial infrastructure buildout: two Compute plans ($0.63/hr 3-year + $0.09/hr 1-year) covering ECS Fargate, and one Database plan ($0.111/hr 1-year) covering Aurora Serverless v2 ACU-hours. These were purchased before the full cost profile was understood — the 1-year plans would have been 3-year terms with higher commitments if purchased today. Combined estimated savings: ~$100–150/month across compute and database. The 1-year plans expire in early 2027 and will be replaced with properly sized 3-year commitments.
Purchased a second 1-year No Upfront Database Savings Plan at $0.45/hr ($328.50/month) to cover the growing Aurora Serverless v2 baseline ahead of subscriber and partner onboarding. Combined with the existing $0.111/hr plan, total database commitment is now $0.561/hr ($409.53/month) — covering approximately 4–5 ACU at the discounted rate. 3-year Database Savings Plans are not yet available from AWS; both 1-year plans will be re-evaluated at expiration in April 2027.
The Lambda receipt handler uses the admin API over public HTTPS (api.cpmp-site.org/admin/sql) for all database operations and /admin/invalidate-key for cache invalidation. This avoids a $32/month NAT Gateway entirely. The same pattern applies to the email-sender Lambda (SES is public, no VPC needed).
Deleted 3 unused Interface VPC endpoints (SES API, SES SMTP, Bedrock Runtime) that were provisioned speculatively but never used — ECS tasks have public IPs and AutoOps Lambdas are outside the VPC. Saving $21/month ($252/year) in endpoint hourly charges (3 endpoints × 3 AZs × $0.01/hr). Retained: Secrets Manager and SQS (used by queued-writer Lambda in VPC), S3 Gateway (free), plus the ElastiCache Serverless auto-managed endpoint.
Added trinity-beast-email-queue and trinity-beast-email-sender Lambda to decouple receipt emails from the response path. Net cost impact: effectively $0 — SQS is $0.40/million messages (receipt emails are a few per day), and the email-sender Lambda invokes a few times daily at ~100ms each. The architectural benefit (durable emails, faster Lambda response, fault isolation) comes at no measurable cost increase.
Transparency note: The Compute and initial Database savings plans were purchased early in the project before the full infrastructure cost profile was understood. The 1-year Compute plan ($0.09/hr) would have been a 3-year term with a higher commitment. The Database commitment was increased in April 2026 with an additional $0.45/hr plan to cover the growing Aurora baseline ahead of launch. 3-year Database Savings Plans are not yet offered by AWS — only 1-year terms are available. All 1-year plans expire in early-mid 2027 and will be re-evaluated based on actual production usage.
| Commitment | Type | Rate | Monthly | Term | Expires | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compute Savings Plan | ECS Fargate | $0.630/hr | $459.90 | 3-year | April 2029 | ✅ Active |
| Compute Savings Plan | ECS Fargate | $0.090/hr | $65.70 | 1-year | March 2027 | ✅ Active |
| Database Savings Plan | Aurora Serverless v2 | $0.111/hr | $81.03 | 1-year | April 2027 | ✅ Active |
| Database Savings Plan | Aurora Serverless v2 | $0.450/hr | $328.50 | 1-year | April 2027 | ✅ Active |
| ElastiCache Reserved Node | cache.r7g.2xlarge (Valkey) | $0.363/hr | $264.99 | 3-year | Cancelled | ✅ Cancelled July 2026 (confirmed, $266.62 credit) |
Total committed: $935.13/mo (the superseded ElastiCache RI was cancelled July 2026 — $264.99/mo eliminated). All plans are No Upfront. The 1-year plans (Compute $0.09/hr and Database $0.111/hr + $0.45/hr) will be re-evaluated when they expire in 2027. Note: 3-year Database Savings Plans are not currently offered by AWS — only 1-year terms are available. ElastiCache now runs fully Serverless (pay-per-use, ~$45/mo at current load) with no reserved commitment.
| Opportunity | Potential Savings | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Increase Compute commitment at 1yr renewal (Mar 2027) | ~$50–100/mo additional | 3-year term, higher hourly commitment |
| Re-evaluate Database commitment at renewal (Apr 2027) | Size to actual production ACU baseline | 1-year term (3-year not yet available from AWS) |
| Reduce to 2 containers (off-peak) | ~$335/mo | Reduced redundancy during low traffic |
Pricing as of: April 2026, us-east-2 on-demand rates.
| Service | Rate |
|---|---|
| ECS Fargate vCPU | $0.04048/vCPU-hour |
| ECS Fargate Memory | $0.004445/GB-hour |
| Aurora Serverless v2 | $0.12/ACU-hour |
| ElastiCache Serverless | Pay-per-use (ECPU + storage, ~$70/mo at current load) |
| ALB | $0.0225/hour + $0.008/LCU-hour |
| NLB | $0.0225/hour + $0.006/NLCU-hour |
| CloudFront | $0.085/GB (first 10 TB) |
| Route 53 | $0.50/hosted zone + $0.40/M queries |
Costs exclude data transfer between AZs and to the internet. Data transfer within the same AZ is free.
The Trinity Beast is built and operated by Cory Dean Kalani — one engineer, one vision, one binary. This is a deliberate architectural choice, not a limitation. The system is designed to run unassisted unless something occurs outside preset tolerances.
Every component is self-healing by design:
The Trinity Beast does not require a babysitter. It runs itself, heals itself, and serves its purpose without manual intervention. Human attention is reserved for evolution — not survival. This is a miracle machine with a mission.