# Ship the on-device slice before the cloud starts billing you

- Category: business
- Author: Titus Nicolae (https://indie.md/people/titus-nicolae/)
- Source: https://indie.md/journeys/titus-hausjam/
- Canonical URL: https://indie.md/advice/on-device-cleaner-before-the-cloud-planner/

HausJam's expensive seconds are image passes, and image passes billed in the cloud will eat a consumer product the first week it works. Titus's V0.5 is deliberately smaller: a room cleaner that runs on the user's machine, inside a 4 to 8 GB memory budget if they can hold it, so the first useful magic has a marginal cost near zero. Steam then becomes a storefront for a tool, not a server bill in disguise. The pattern is the same one indie founders keep relearning with local models: put the wedge on hardware the user already owns, and let the cloud be an upgrade for the people who need the heavy lighting pass. If your v1 requires a GPU invoice on every photo, you do not have a consumer business yet. You have a demo with a fuse.