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

stevehanov.ca

201–210 of 539 posts

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

#201
post #105

The most interesting thing in here is https://github.com/smhanov/laconic which is the author's "agentic research orchestrator for Go that is optimized to use free search & low-cost limited context window llms". I have been doing this kind of thing with Cursor and Codex subscriptions, but they do have annoying rate limits, and Cursor on the Auto model seems to perform poorly if you ask it to do too much work, so I am…

Yeah, came here to mention that too! From the article: >To manage all this, I built laconic, an agentic researcher specifically optimized for running in a constrained 8K context window. It manages the LLM context like an operating system's virtual memory manager—it "pages out" the irrelevant baggage of a conversation, keeping only the absolute most critical facts in the active LLM context window. The 8K part is the m…

> (The analog these days would be that many people would be better off asking Claw to write a scraper for them, than having it drive Chromium 24/7...)

Possibly. But possibly you have a very long tail of sites that you hardly ever look at, and that change more frequently than you use them, and maintaining the scraper is harder work than just using Chromium.

The dream is that the Claw would judge for itself whether to write a scraper or hand-drive the browser.

That might happen more easily if LLMs were a bit lazier. If they didn't like doing drudgery they would be motivated to automate it away. Unfortunately they are much too willing to do long, boring, repetitive tasks.

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

#203
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your coworker run a blog on k8s?

None of them self host anything at all. It's like that skill was totally skipped. But they advise and consult on infra

Well, by the time you are hiring a dedicated infra role, you should be past the single VPS stage.

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

#204

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…

When creating a VPS on Hetzner, it lets you by default to configure the key auth only.

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

#206
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, came here to mention that too! From the article: >To manage all this, I built laconic, an agentic researcher specifically optimized for running in a constrained 8K context window. It manages the LLM context like an operating system's virtual memory manager—it "pages out" the irrelevant baggage of a conversation, keeping only the absolute most critical facts in the active LLM context window. The 8K part is the m…

> (The analog these days would be that many people would be better off asking Claw to write a scraper for them, than having it drive Chromium 24/7...) Possibly. But possibly you have a very long tail of sites that you hardly ever look at, and that change more frequently than you use them, and maintaining the scraper is harder work than just using Chromium. The dream is that the Claw would judge for itself whether to…

Yeah, I think the ideal setup is two-tier.

extremely lazy, large model

        +
extremely diligent Ralph

Not sure if top model should be the biggest one though. I hear opposite opinions there. Small model which delegates coding to bigger models, vs big model which delegates coding to small models.

The issue is you don't want the main driver to be big, but it needs to be big enough to have common sense w.r.t. delegating both up[0] and down...

[0] i.e. "too hard for me, I will ping Opus ..." :) do models have that level of self awareness? I wanna say it can be after a failed attempt, but my failure mode is that the model "succeeds" but the solution is total ass.

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

#207
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... )

Most important is that that local SQLite gets proper backups, so a restore goes without issues

Gets proper backups if you back it up the right way https://sqlite.org/backup.html

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

#208
I'm taking the opposite approach - managed services all the way, and my monthly infrastructure costs are higher than what's described here.

No regrets. Infrastructure isn't the problem I'm trying to solve. The problem is: who's actually going to pay for this?

Optimizing infrastructure before you have customers is like designing a kitchen before you've written the menu. I launched within 72 hours of starting development and went straight to customer validation. The market feedback started coming in immediately.

Infrastructure costs show up in your bill. The cost of slow customer validation doesn't show up anywhere - until it's too late. That's the number I watch.

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

#209
post #80
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... )

This is mostly about thread communication. With SQLite you can guarantee no context switching. Postgres running on the same box gets you close but not all the way. It's still in a different process.

This. Run an app on the same box as PG and you can easily be plagued by out of memory etc (as there's memory contention between the two processes).

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

#210
post #58
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.

There are a myriad middle states in-between "frupid" (so frugal that it's stupid) and "Instagram scale".

Python requires much more hand-holding that many don't want to do for good reasons (I prefer to work on the product unimpeded and not feeling pride having the knowledge to babysit obsolete stacks carried by university nostalgia).

With Go, Rust, Zig, and a few others -- it's a single binary.

In this same HN thread another person said it better than me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737151

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