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

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

#171

Post by locknitpicker »

nlitened wrote: post #156
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.

> There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM There is a good reason: teaching yourself not to over-engineer, over-provision, or overthink, and instead to focus on generating business value to customers and getting more paying customers. I think it’s what many engineers are keen to overlook behind fun technical details.

> There is a good reason: teaching yourself not to over-engineer, over-provision, or overthink, (...)

This is specious reasoning. You don't prevent anything by adding artificial constraints. To put things in perspective, Hetzner's cheapest vCPU plan comes with 4GB of RAM.

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

#172

Post by compounding_it »

KronisLV wrote: post #93

> I use Linode or DigitalOcean. Pay no more than $5 to $10 a month. 1GB of RAM sounds terrifying to modern web developers, but it is plenty if you know what you are doing. If you get one dedicated server for multiple separate projects, you can still keep the costs down but relax those constraints. For example, look at the Hetzner server auction: https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ I pay about 40 EUR a month for this: Disk: 7…

What do you do about ipv4 ? Do you also use a routing VM to manage all that ?

It’s very interesting how people rent large VMs with a hypervisor. I’m wondering if licenses for VPS have any clauses preventing this for commercial scale.

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

#173

Post by anana_ »

senko wrote: post #106
anana_ wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes you need the absolute cutting-edge reasoning of Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o Dead giveaway

Maybe it's tongue-in-cheek.

Upon rereading, I'd agree. Fits with the tone of the rest of the write up.

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

#174

Post by gobdovan »

InfraScaler wrote: post #139
gobdovan wrote: post #18

Nice list! I'd say the SQLite with WAL is the biggest money saver mentioned. One note: you can absolutely use Python or Node just as well as Go. There's Hetzner that offers 4GB RAM, 10TB network (then 1$/TB egress), 2CPUs machines for 5$. Two disclaimers for VPS: If you're using a dedicated server instead of a cloud server, just don't forget to backup DB to a Storage box often (3$ /mo for 1TB, use rsync). It's a good…

Does WAL really offer multiple concurrent writers? I know little about DBs and I've done a couple of Google searches and people say it allows concurrent reads while a write is happening, but no concurrent writers? Not everybody says so... So, can anyone explain what's the right way to think about WAL?

No, it does not allow concurrent writes (with some exceptions if you get into it [0]). You should generally use it only if write serialisation is acceptable. Reads and writes are concurrent except for the commit stage of writes, which SQLite tries to keep short but is workload- and storage-dependent.

Now this is more controversial take and you should always benchmark on your own traffic projections, but:

consider that if you don't have a ton of indexes, the raw throughput of SQLite is so good that on many access patterns you'd already have to shard a Postgres instance anyway to surpass where SQLite single-write limitation would become the bottleneck.

[0] https://www.sqlite.org/src/doc/begin-concurrent/doc/begin_co...

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

#175

Post by compounding_it »

elAhmo wrote: post #146
jampekka wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

Saving 15 USD on 10k+ USD MMR is ridiculous.

Given how much revenue depends on the experience of a web app and loading times, I’d be happy to pay 100$ a month on that revenue if I don’t have to sacrifice a second of additional loading time no matter how clever I was optimizing it.

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

#176

Post by rpdillon »

locknitpicker wrote: post #155
andersmurphy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sqlite smokes postgres on the same machine even with domain sockets [1]. This is before you get into using multiple sqlite database. What features postgres offers over sqlite in the context of running on a single machine with a monolithic app? Application functions [2] means you can extend it however you need with the same language you use to build your application. It also has a much better backup and replication st…

> Sqlite smokes postgres on the same machine even with domain sockets [1]. SQLite on the same machine is akin to calling fwrite. That's fine. This is also a system constraint as it forces a one-database-per-instance design, with no data shared across nodes. This is fine if you're putting together a site for your neighborhood's mom and pop shop, but once you need to handle a request baseline beyond a few hundreds TPS…

I wonder what percentage of services run on the Internet exceed a few hundred transactions per second.

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

#177

Post by faangguyindia »

raincole wrote: post #32

So what's the $10K MMR product, exactly? The lede is buried into nonexistence. Is it this one: https://www.websequencediagrams.com/ ...? > Here is the trick that you might have missed: somehow, Microsoft is able to charge per request, not per token. And a "request" is simply what I type into the chat box. Even if the agent spends the next 30 minutes chewing through my entire codebase, mapping dependencies, and changi…

It's already known. The trick is ms has very small context size. So it won't be much useful.

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

#178

Post by chiefalchemist »

stephbook wrote: post #122
brkn wrote: post #81

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 unders…

It actually starts with a completely unrelated anecdote: "What do you even need funding for?" I agree. The author claims to have multiple $10K MRR websites running on $20 costs. I also don't understand what he needs money for — shouldn't the $x0,000 be able to fund the $20 for the next project? It doesn't make any sense at all. Then the author trails off and tells us how he runs on $20/month. Well, why did you apply…

Just because you start this lean doesn’t mean you should stay that way. Perhaps he’s now spending too much time managing his stack and not enough time on product development, customer service, a/o growth.

In other words, what gets you to $10k MRR isn’t the same thing(s) for 2x, 5x, or 10x that.

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

#179

Post by rpdillon »

balgg wrote: post #77
p4bl0 wrote: post #6

Just in case, if there are others like me who where wondering what does "MRR" means, it seems to be "monthly recurring revenue".

There is also ARR which is "annual recurring revenue" and you should know that when people use ARR they usually are just making up numbers based on their current MRR (so lying). I've seen people announce their ARR after running their business for two whole months!

Rather than lying, I think of it more as financial dead reckoning.
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