$341. That Is What a Full Week of Side Gigs Paid Out
$341 net. That is the number after gas, app fees, and the two coffees I needed to survive each shift. Sounds decent until you divide it by the hours. I logged 23 hours across DoorDash and a small Roblox asset commission. That works out to roughly $14.83 an hour. Not minimum wage bad. Not life-changing good. Somewhere in the middle, which is exactly where most side gig weeks live whether you want to admit it or not.
See the cash truly available after bills, payroll, taxes, and reserves before making your next move.
The Line Items, Ugly and Unedited
DoorDash — 18 hours, $287 gross, $214 net. Gas ate $51. App fees and service charges pulled another $22. I did a double shift on a Sunday because the base pay looked good. It was not good. Three no-tip orders in a row, one of which sent me 11 miles out to a subdivision with a gate code that didn't work. Sat there for six minutes. That's on the receipt too.
Roblox asset commission — 5 hours, $127. This one actually held up. Client wanted a custom UI kit, paid upfront via PayPal, no drama. Five hours of focused work at the desk after the kids were down. The hourly math here is $25.40, which is why I keep saying the creative side of the hustle is worth protecting even when the dashboard gigs feel more urgent.
Equipment wear — $0 invoiced, real cost estimated $18. Mileage on the car doesn't show up in the payout screen. I track it manually in a notes app because if I don't, I'll pretend it doesn't exist. It does exist. It's just quiet about it.
Missed gym sessions — 2. No dollar figure. Logged it anyway because the chaos has a way of collecting from places that don't send invoices. Two sessions gone means the back tightens up, the sleep quality drops, and the next week starts at a deficit before Monday even clocks in.
Total net cash: $341. Total hours: 23. Effective rate: $14.83/hr. It's not pretty, but it works. Until it doesn't.
The Cost That Never Made the Spreadsheet
Here is the one thing the numbers will not show you: decision fatigue is a line item with no field.
By Wednesday I was making small dumb calls — took a low-paying order because I couldn't be bothered to decline it, skipped reviewing the Roblox brief properly and had to redo a component, said yes to a late pickup when I should've logged off. None of that shows up as a dollar amount. It just quietly raises the cost of every other decision around it.
I've been paying attention to where the week actually leaks, and it's almost never the obvious stuff. It's the hour-15 of a shift I should have ended at hour-12. It's the mental overhead of keeping three income streams mentally active at the same time.
$341 cleared. The insight is this: the hourly rate on paper is not the hourly rate you're actually working at. The gap between those two numbers is where burnout is quietly building its case. That's the only number worth watching.