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My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

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101–110 of 219 posts

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#101
post #38

Love this! I published a similar one last month: https://buttondown.email/stack --- A couple notes on where I differ/concur from OP: 1. ahrefs is absolutely worth its price in gold. 2. IMHO intercom is overpriced relative to competitors depending on how you use it, with the caveat that I hate in-app messaging widgets and consider them a blight on the modern web. (HelpScout is my preferred app.) 3. I deeply miss my Fr…

> Auth: I know it's increasingly trendy to outsource auth to a paid vendor but I'm not a fan of the lock-in and I like having full control over the experience.

Amen. I thought I was alone in this.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#102

I would NOT call this frugal at all, actually. You are overspending in a lot of places and under spending in others. $281.32 per month for such a simple service is...astonishing. Change Vercel and Intercom with Cloudflare and Chatwoot (self hosted), and you have saved $120/mo. Get rid of Ahrefs for Ubersuggest (or no SEO tool at all) to save about $80 more. That leaves you with $81.32/mo. If you try even harder, you…

Exactly!

3.375$ a year: call it frugal...

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#103

I would NOT call this frugal at all, actually. You are overspending in a lot of places and under spending in others. $281.32 per month for such a simple service is...astonishing. Change Vercel and Intercom with Cloudflare and Chatwoot (self hosted), and you have saved $120/mo. Get rid of Ahrefs for Ubersuggest (or no SEO tool at all) to save about $80 more. That leaves you with $81.32/mo. If you try even harder, you…

Battle of the SaaSes! The challenge: Can you build a profitable SaaS without giving money to other SaaSes!

People used to make websites by uploading some php or perl scripts to a shared server (or just buying a domain and pointing it at their home ip). In that context, I can't imagine someone writing an article like this.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#104
post #38

Love this! I published a similar one last month: https://buttondown.email/stack --- A couple notes on where I differ/concur from OP: 1. ahrefs is absolutely worth its price in gold. 2. IMHO intercom is overpriced relative to competitors depending on how you use it, with the caveat that I hate in-app messaging widgets and consider them a blight on the modern web. (HelpScout is my preferred app.) 3. I deeply miss my Fr…

> Auth: I know it's increasingly trendy to outsource auth to a paid vendor but I'm not a fan of the lock-in and I like having full control over the experience. Amen. I thought I was alone in this.

You are not alone! I’m an ardent self-hoster.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hetzner servers It is truly amazing to me the value that is provided by renting hardware instead of VPSes. As long as you're willing to roll your own infrastructure instead of buy into a cloud provider's infrastructure.

If you know what you're doing it's easy enough to roll out a multi-region distributed system with HA and backups on a pretty modest ( However, most people do not - some will learn, but most will fall for the cloud marketing depts and become infra renters for life. Teach a man to fish, and so on.

Another reason is that if you look for an investor, one of the first things they ask is how / where you host it. If it is anything remotely DIY you'll be turned down.

It was actually painful to see start ups spending thousands a month on hosting, that could be easily achieved as you say under 100 pcm plus. They would have to get a contractor to set it up and for support, but it would have worked out much cheaper and they could have bumped the salaries of their workers.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know what you're doing it's easy enough to roll out a multi-region distributed system with HA and backups on a pretty modest ( However, most people do not - some will learn, but most will fall for the cloud marketing depts and become infra renters for life. Teach a man to fish, and so on.

Another reason is that if you look for an investor, one of the first things they ask is how / where you host it. If it is anything remotely DIY you'll be turned down. It was actually painful to see start ups spending thousands a month on hosting, that could be easily achieved as you say under 100 pcm plus. They would have to get a contractor to set it up and for support, but it would have worked out much cheaper and…

Labor vs. commodity. Need an expert key-man to roll your own AWS. A few thousand bucks a month for the automatic one. Penny wise pound foolish etc.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#107

I would NOT call this frugal at all, actually. You are overspending in a lot of places and under spending in others. $281.32 per month for such a simple service is...astonishing. Change Vercel and Intercom with Cloudflare and Chatwoot (self hosted), and you have saved $120/mo. Get rid of Ahrefs for Ubersuggest (or no SEO tool at all) to save about $80 more. That leaves you with $81.32/mo. If you try even harder, you…

I agree. Use one of the OSS password managers to save on 1P. If you have a cloud sync service you already use, KeePassXC + cloud sync will solve having the passwords available everywhere you are. You can even use Syncthing for free (though I'd at least donate once off) since you can use it peer-to-peer between your devices. SEO really needs disruption here on price. Ubersuggest seems decent. On Intercom: OP can proba…

Not a 1Password fan, but if your business hinges on 3$/month you probably shouldn't do business.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#108
I wouldn't say this one to be frugal, but then frugality varies by different parameters. What they priortize (Eg: a dedicated marketing tool vs sending marketing through app itself), what their expertise in (hosting in vps vs aws vs heroku, etc), the type of service, team size and so on. As there are 10 ways to do the same thing all with a different tradeoffs.

Being solo myself, I aim to keep my costs as low as possible as well. Until my last product, all my previous products I kept the running costs to $3 per month (just for the server on hetzner). Rest all were free services (tawk.to for CS, Zoho for email, postmark for emails, and so on). Granted they weren't making much, just couple of hundred dollars per month, but then it was pure profit and it got fun to measure the returns in profit than just revenue.

For the latest one, all in all I spend around $30 per month with close to $1250 in mrr. So it has generous spend to return ratio. The only three running cost are the helpscout (for customer support, docs, etc.), google workspace and the servers with Hetzner. HelpScout and Google workspace were my way of "splurging" the costs.

Last I checked I was using close to 16 services (ranging from marketing to revenue tracking), so weren't really skimping on tools to save costs either.

The free tools (including several the op mentioned) are awesome to get started, but many of these services' costs would jump multi-fold even if you add one other team member or go just above the limit. That's anyway all these services' business model as well.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#109

> I use AWS EC2 for Waitlist's backend python webserver, RDS for the postgres database, S3 for file storage, and an Elastic IP. I use T2 and T3 instances. My AWS bill would be $200-300 a month Seems like a high bill for what sounds like basically a hosted email list? I would have expected compute and storage costs to be very low. E: This was NOT a point about how cloud costs are ridiculous. Even for cloud this seems…

Well, it is high, when everything could be run on a $5 VPS with higher availability, less complexity, faster backups and simpler deploys.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#110
post #32

I can’t imagine Intercom is worth like 1/3 of the budget. I’ve never used one of those AI pop ups and have always felt them annoying

I also hate chat bubbles, ending up replacing them with a simple contact form: https://www.uxwizz.com/blog/self-hosted-alternative-3rd-part...

It seems to work pretty well, it could be entirely self-hosted, but I like using a 3rd party service, mostly to make sure the emails are delivered and because I don't yet have my own self-hosted mail service (planning to start one soon, especially for such transactional emails that I receive myself and can make sure they don't arrive in spam).

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