Portfolio size vs. time spent managing—where's your breakpoint?

Ok so I have exactly 100 domains in my portfolio right now and I tracked it for 6 months because I had this spreadsheet from when I started in 2019 and back then I had 12 domains and it took me maybe 30 minutes a week but now with 100 domains I am spending 10 hours every single week and that was last tuesday when the server went down at Contabo and I was eating my oatmeal with blueberries because that is what I eat every tuesday and my cat Mr whiskers he jumped off the couch because the thunder was loud and the weather was rainy that day in ohio and I thought why am I spending so much time and I counted every minute so 10 hours is the real number and I want to know where everyone else breaks because maybe I am doing something wrong or maybe I need automation but I do not know how to code and I tried to learn python in 2021 but gave up after two weeks and the course was on sale for 12 dollars which I thought was a good deal but it wasn't and now I am here asking you all where your breakpoint is and please actually read this whole thing before replying because I hate when people only read the first line and then ask questions I already answered

Bon so I have 47 domains and the time it is maybe 4 hours per week, I do not know exactly how to say "breakpoint" in english but for me the automation it is not yet necessary, I manage everything with spreadsheets and bon sometimes I forget to renew one! The registrar it sends emails but I do not always read them immediately, voilà

Sorry for the silly question, but how do you even track time per domain? I have 20 and I feel like I'm always working on them but I never know how long Is there a simple tool or do you just use a spreadsheet?

Asking because privacy matters when you're holding 200+ domains. I spend maybe 3 hours/week but only because I automated everything through the API. Could do less but I like checking prices manually sometimes.

Fun little project: I built a renewal bot on a NAT VPS at OVHcloud, costs me €3/month and handles 500 domains in about 2 hours/week of actual attention. The rest is just monitoring alerts. Here's the core loop:

#!/bin/bash
# check_expiry.sh
for domain in $(cat domains.txt); do
  expiry=$(whois $domain | grep "Expiry" | awk '{print $NF}')
  days=$(( ($(date -d $expiry +%s) - $(date +%s)) / 86400 ))
  [ $days -lt 30 ] && echo "ALERT: $domain expires in $days days"
done

It actually works.

@tomchan thank you for share script, I will try to adapt for my portfolio. I have 35 domains and spend maybe 6 hours, I think I need make a server up for automation. Regards