Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: How to run a startup for $6 a year

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 34 posts

Tell HN: How to run a startup for $6 a year

#1
Use this stack.

1. DynamoDB for database

2. AWS Lambda for backend

3. Netlify / Now / Surge for frontend

4. S3 for file/image hosting

5. Cloudinary for image hosting

6. IFTTT to webhook for cron

7. RedisLabs for queues, cache

8. Figma for designing and prototyping

9. Porkbun for $6 .com domains

10. Cloudflare for DNS

This setup is enough to handle ~1M/requests month, more or less, depending on the application.

If you are getting more traffic than that, your startup will be making money so you won’t mind upgrading. :)

Re: Tell HN: How to run a startup for $6 a year

#5
Does this count network egress costs (for s3, lambda)? Those are hard to calculate but can add up. Also, you can uses sqs for queues, that has a pretty big free tier.

Finally, I think that bending the architecture of your app around what's free is not the best idea, especially if you are trying to get something out there to see if there is customer demand. (And doubly of you haven't built a cloud native app like is outlined here.)

In my mind the best way to build software for a startup is to build it using what you know as fast as you can. Avoid technical risk, because you have a boatload of business risk.

For me, that'd be using rails on heroku, which is still under $200/year for a fully functional dyno and database. For others it might be some varient of a mvc framework on a hosting provider. For others it might be WordPress (gasp!). For others it might be a cloud native app, as this post describes.

As long as you aren't spending extravagantly, time is more important than money when figuring out what your customers need.

This is true both in companies that have raised money and bootstrapped companies, for different reasons. For the first, you took money and need to figure out your product market for or scaling strategy ASAP. For the second, your time is super valuable because it is tied to your motivation. Doing work directly tied to customer value is a great motivator. (Doing other fun technical things that don't deliver customer value is a good way to learn things, but a bad way to run a bootstrapped business.)

Re: Tell HN: How to run a startup for $6 a year

#7

what about sending and receiving email?

With Mailgun[0] you can send 5000 emails for 3 months for free.

The Amazon Simple Mail Service (SES)[1] lets you send 2000 emails per day with the Free Tier...

Sendgrid[2] gives you 40k emails for 30 days and then 100 per day for free forever...

[0] https://www.mailgun.com/

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ses/

[2] https://sendgrid.com/

Post reply on HN