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

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

#11

Post by andrewvieyra »

Some possible alternatives/improvements:

The AWS S3 free tier is 5GB for 12 months, with 20,000 GET requests and 2,000 PUT requests. [1]

Backblaze B2 (AWS S3 alternative) provides 10GB of free storage (no expiry date), and is part of the 'Bandwidth Alliance' [2] with CloudFlare. So aside from some pretty generous daily transaction fees (of which 2,500 of each type are free per day) [3], you could have your own free almost-cdn.

Porkbun currently have a 1st year (new domain registration) discount bringing the $6 .com domain cost down to $3,90. [4]

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

[2] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

[3] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/b2-transactions-price.html

[4] https://porkbun.com/tld/com

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

#12

Post by mark_l_watson »

mooreds wrote: post #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 o…

I agree, for web apps with modest user requirements, Heroku is great. I am just running static web sites right now but if I start a new project I would probably start with Heroku. Their always on hobbyists dyno is $7/month and adequate.

If you ever grow your customer base it is not that difficult to move to directly using AWS, GCP, Azure, DO, etc.

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

#13

Post by justaguyhere »

polyterative wrote: post #3

i remember buying a domain on namecheap for 1$

As always, the devil is in the details. Was it a .com domain? I'm guessing $1 for the first year, is that correct? What is the cost from second year onwards?

Many companies use deceptive marketing selling stuff for such a low cost that it is too good to believe and it often is - you gotta read the fine print. I got my internet connection for $75 and two years later, I am paying 108$ for the exact same thing, with no additional benefit.

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

#15

Post by ArtWomb »

petercooper wrote: post #9

The vibe I'm getting in this thread is people are recommending services that are free for developers.. in which case, I recently discovered https://free-for.dev/ which is a mammoth list of such things.

Wow mammoth indeed ;)

Section I was most interested in "STUN, WebRTC, Web Socket Servers and Other Routers". I like the services like ngrok where you can just create a public ip for locally running web servers from the ide.

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

#16

Post by pier25 »

> 1. DynamoDB for database 2. AWS Lambda for backend 3. Netlify / Now / Surge for frontend

I'm evaluating FaunaDB with Zeit Now and so far it looks like a winning combo.

Zeit Now makes your dev much easier as all your application (front(s) + backend) can be in a single repo.

I don't have much experience with Dynamo but Fauna includes authentication + authorization out of the box and I think a more powerful query language. It also has first class support for GraphQL.

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

#17

Post by inkeddeveloper »

utf_8x wrote: post #7
yesusalgusti wrote: post #4

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/

+1 for sendgrid

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

#18

Post by hbcondo714 »

utf_8x wrote: post #7
yesusalgusti wrote: post #4

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/

I still get 25K emails / month for free with SendGrid using Azure:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sendgrid-dotnet-how-t...

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

#20

Post by kakwa_ »

justaguyhere wrote: post #13
polyterative wrote: post #3

i remember buying a domain on namecheap for 1$

As always, the devil is in the details. Was it a .com domain? I'm guessing $1 for the first year, is that correct? What is the cost from second year onwards? Many companies use deceptive marketing selling stuff for such a low cost that it is too good to believe and it often is - you gotta read the fine print. I got my internet connection for $75 and two years later, I am paying 108$ for the exact same thing, with no…

you can pick very cheap domains with some tlds.

For example, my .ovh is costing me around 4$ per year and there are probably even cheaper tlds.

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