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

stevehanov.ca

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

#241
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That 1 second of loading time probably has more to do with heavy frontends and third-party scripts, than the backend server's capacity.

$100 is peanuts to most businesses, of course. But even so, I'd rather spend it on fixing an actual bottleneck.

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

#243
post #79

If this sounds like basic advice, consider there are a lot of people out there that believe they have to start with serverless, kubernetes, fleets of servers, planet-scale databases, multi-zone high-availability setups, and many other "best practices". Saying "you can just run things on a cheap VPS" sounds amateurish: people are immediately out with "Yeah but scaling", "Yeah but high availability", "Yeah but backups"…

I don't know what to say. People keep saying these engineers exist and here I am not having seen a single, and I follow many indie hackers communities.

I've worked at a startup that could've trivially ran on a single VPS and kept things simple yet had a dedicated infra guy using a full k8s setup.

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

#244
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.

Or better yet, go with a euro provider like Hetzner and get 8GB of RAM for $10 or so. :) Even their $5 plan gives 4GB.

I've been using Linode for years and just yday went to use Hetzner for a new VPS and they wanted my home address and passport. No thanks.

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

#245
This is my life goal right now. I have a bajillion ideas, know how to code them (even faster now), and just not enough time due to day job. A few questions:

How do you market them?

Is customer support an issue?

Do you see risk since ai makes it so easy to build/copy?

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

#246
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I love them both too but that might not be the best metric unless you’re planning to run lots of little read queries. Exactly. Back in the real world,anyone who is faced with that sort of usecase will simply add memory cache and not bother with the persistence layer.

Not sure that’s always right either though. For example Mapbox used to use an SQLite database as the disk cache for map tile info. You cannot possibly store that amount of data in memory, so it’s a great use case.

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

#247

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…

> You are responsible for security. I saw good devs skipping basic SSH hardening and get infected by bots in Note that you don't need all of that to keep your SSH server secure. Just having a good password (ideally on a non-root account) is more than enough.

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

#248
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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…

Re: your footnote, Anthropic certainly seem to think so [0]

[0] https://claude.com/blog/the-advisor-strategy

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

#249
post #79

If this sounds like basic advice, consider there are a lot of people out there that believe they have to start with serverless, kubernetes, fleets of servers, planet-scale databases, multi-zone high-availability setups, and many other "best practices". Saying "you can just run things on a cheap VPS" sounds amateurish: people are immediately out with "Yeah but scaling", "Yeah but high availability", "Yeah but backups"…

And now big tech often doesn't even have the high availability to show for all that complexity.

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

#250
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.

Where can you get 8GB for $20?
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