I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack • Hacker News Board

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#81

Post by brkn » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 8:55 AM UTC

The text feels incoherent to me and lacks some nuance.

It starts about cutting costs by the choice of infrastructure and goes further to less resource hungry tools and cheaper services. But never compares the cost of these things. Do I save actually the upgrade to a bigger server by using Go and sqlite over let's say Python and postgres? Or does it not even matter when you have just n many users. Then I do not understand why at one point the convenience of using OpenRouter is preferred over managing multiple API keys, when that should be cheaper and a cost point that could increase faster than your infrastructure costs.

There are some more points, but I do not want to write a long comment.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#82

Post by mstaoru » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 8:56 AM UTC

While I applaud the acumen, this reads like watching a kid standing on the 3rd floor balcony shouting "look what I can do!"

$20/month. Yeah. Great, but why? You get a lot of peace of mind with "real" HA setup with real backups and real recovery, for not much more than $20, if you are careful.

Another half of article is about running "free, unlimited" local AI on a GPU (Santa brought it) with, apparently, free electricity (Santa pays for it).

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#83

Post by piker » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 8:57 AM UTC

eurleif wrote: post #73

hackingonempty wrote: post #31

> The enterprise mindset dictates that you need an out-of-process database server. But the truth is, a local SQLite file communicating over the C-interface or memory is orders of magnitude faster than making a TCP network hop to a remote Postgres server. I don't want to diss SQLite because it is awesome and more than adequate for many/most web apps but you can connect to Postgres (or any DB really) on localhost over…

Looks like the overhead is not insignificant: Running 100,000 `SELECT 1` queries: PostgreSQL (localhost): 2.77 seconds SQLite (in-memory): 0.07 seconds ( https://gist.github.com/leifkb/1ad16a741fd061216f074aedf1eca... )

I love them both too but that might not be the best metric unless you’re planning to run lots of little read queries. If you’re doing CRUD, simulating that workflow may favor Postgres given the transactional read/write work that needs to take place across multiple concurrent connections.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#84

Post by bdelmas » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 8:58 AM UTC

jampekka wrote: post #70

f311a wrote: post #47

There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM. By paying $20 instead of $5 you can get at least 8gb of RAM. You can use it for caches or a database that supports concurrent writes. The $15 difference won’t make any financial difference if you are trying to run a small business. Thinking about on how to fit everything on a $5 VPS does not help your business.

$15 is not exactly zero, is it? If you don't need more than 1GB, why pay anything for more than 1GB? I recall running LAMP stacks on something like 128MB about 20 years ago and not really having problems with memory. Most current website backends are not really much more complicated than they were back then if you don't haul in bloat.

It is. With 10k MRR it represents 0.15% of the revenue. Having the whole backend costing that much for a company selling web apps is like it’s costing zero.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#85

Post by pdhborges » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 9:01 AM UTC

Jolter wrote: post #64

hackingonempty wrote: post #31

> The enterprise mindset dictates that you need an out-of-process database server. But the truth is, a local SQLite file communicating over the C-interface or memory is orders of magnitude faster than making a TCP network hop to a remote Postgres server. I don't want to diss SQLite because it is awesome and more than adequate for many/most web apps but you can connect to Postgres (or any DB really) on localhost over…

I mean, you’re not wrong about the facts, but it’s also pretty trivial to migrate the data from SQLite into a separate Postgres server later, if it turns out you do need those features after all. But most of the time, you don’t.

I bet that takes more time than the 5 extra minutes you take to setup Postgres in the same box upfront.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#86

Post by gloomyday » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 9:01 AM UTC

I think newer developers really need to learn that you can actually do production stuff using bare tools. It is not crazy, especially in the beginning, and it will save you a ton of money and time.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#87

Post by jasdfwasd » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 9:01 AM UTC

blitzar wrote: post #58

danhau wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it nonsense? Sounds reasonable to me.

> its ceiling (both typical and absolute) is far lower If you plan to remaining smaller than instagram, the ceiling is comfortably above you.

I plan to remain smaller than two VMs

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#88

Post by kaliqt » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 9:02 AM UTC

jampekka wrote: post #70

f311a wrote: post #47

There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM. By paying $20 instead of $5 you can get at least 8gb of RAM. You can use it for caches or a database that supports concurrent writes. The $15 difference won’t make any financial difference if you are trying to run a small business. Thinking about on how to fit everything on a $5 VPS does not help your business.

$15 is not exactly zero, is it? If you don't need more than 1GB, why pay anything for more than 1GB? I recall running LAMP stacks on something like 128MB about 20 years ago and not really having problems with memory. Most current website backends are not really much more complicated than they were back then if you don't haul in bloat.

There’s a happy medium and $5 for 1GB RAM just isn’t it.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#89

Post by afro88 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 9:02 AM UTC

aleda145 wrote: post #27

Great stack! I'm doing a similar approach for my latest project (kavla.dev) but using fly.io and their suspend feature. Scaling to zero with database persistence using litestream has cut my bill down to $0.1 per month for my backend+database. Granted I still don't have that many users, and they get 200ms of extra latency if the backend needs to wake up. But it's nice to never have to worry about accidental costs!

This is a really nice setup for side projects and random ideas too. Thanks for sharing!

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#90

Post by dizhn » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 9:04 AM UTC

hackingonempty wrote: post #31

> The enterprise mindset dictates that you need an out-of-process database server. But the truth is, a local SQLite file communicating over the C-interface or memory is orders of magnitude faster than making a TCP network hop to a remote Postgres server. I don't want to diss SQLite because it is awesome and more than adequate for many/most web apps but you can connect to Postgres (or any DB really) on localhost over…

Author's own 'auth' project works with sqlite and postgres.