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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

#261

Post by darkwater »

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 mean, your "This is fine for" is almost literally the whole point of TFA, that you can go a long way, MRR-wise, with a simpler architecture.

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

#262

Post by [deleted] »

direwolf20 wrote: post #152
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…

IIRC TCP/IP through localhost actually benchmarked faster than Unix sockets because it was optimized harder. Might've been fixed now. Unix sockets gives you the advantage of authentication based on the user ID of who's connecting. My experience with sqlite for server-based apps has been that as your app grows, you almost always eventually need something bigger than sqlite and need to migrate anyway. For a server-base…

[deleted]

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

#263

Post by em-bee »

elAhmo wrote: post #148
WolfOliver wrote: post #141

20$ vs 300$ does not really matter if you have multiple 10K MRR.

Exactly. Deciding on some very expensive subscriptions that can cost 1k per month or so might be worth thinking about, but this is just meaningless optimisation.

not at all meaningless. unless you have money to invest, at the beginning you don't have an income. i could not afford to spend $300 a month to host a new product that doesn't make any money yet. i can afford the $20 however, but then once the product does make money, why should i change it if it works?

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

#264

Post by hkpack »

compounding_it wrote: post #172
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.

There are security benefits of not having public IPs on every VM.

I assign few VMs public IPs and use them as ingress / SSL termination / load balancer for my workloads running on VMs with only internal IPs.

I personally use kvm with libvirt and manage all these with Ansible.

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

#265

Post by abujazar »

nerder92 wrote: post #257

This is supposed to be a contrarian opinion yet this is a retoric yapped non-stop in the “build in public” community. Of course lean is a good approach, it makes sense, and most engineers know this. Is not a new concept, we’ve been doing this for years in every branch of engineering. The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist. This is just a story repeated ad nauseam to fit a narr…

I've seen A LOT of public sector projects starting out with loads of Azure services and >$3000 montly bills for applications that could've easily run on a single VM.

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

#266

Post by skeeter2020 »

I get that the focus of this article is on the tech portion, but I don't know anyone pitching today (aside from OpenAI) who is asking for big funding for the tech costs. It doesn't really matter if you built a system that costs you $200/month or $20/month if your lifetime value is $1000 and CAC is only $10 but you've got no money. That's what people want to fund. VC funding is gasoline you pour on a fire (or fuel for you rocket if you're being charitable) - it makes you go faster; a pitch that focuses on "slightly lower monthly op costs" is not attractive.

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

#267

Post by nerder92 »

abujazar wrote: post #265
nerder92 wrote: post #257

This is supposed to be a contrarian opinion yet this is a retoric yapped non-stop in the “build in public” community. Of course lean is a good approach, it makes sense, and most engineers know this. Is not a new concept, we’ve been doing this for years in every branch of engineering. The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist. This is just a story repeated ad nauseam to fit a narr…

I've seen A LOT of public sector projects starting out with loads of Azure services and >$3000 montly bills for applications that could've easily run on a single VM.

This a structural problem not an awareness one. Is not like they don’t know they can run it on a 5$ VPS, the problem is that there are no incentives to do so. You’d be surprised to know how much of engineering is there to address organisational challenges rather than technical ones (ie: micro-services)

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

#268

Post by ethbr1 »

nerder92 wrote: post #257

This is supposed to be a contrarian opinion yet this is a retoric yapped non-stop in the “build in public” community. Of course lean is a good approach, it makes sense, and most engineers know this. Is not a new concept, we’ve been doing this for years in every branch of engineering. The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist. This is just a story repeated ad nauseam to fit a narr…

> The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist.

Can confirm it exists, especially with founders self-coding with LLMs now.

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

#269

Post by nerder92 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #268
nerder92 wrote: post #257

This is supposed to be a contrarian opinion yet this is a retoric yapped non-stop in the “build in public” community. Of course lean is a good approach, it makes sense, and most engineers know this. Is not a new concept, we’ve been doing this for years in every branch of engineering. The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist. This is just a story repeated ad nauseam to fit a narr…

> The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist. Can confirm it exists, especially with founders self-coding with LLMs now.

I can accept this is true, they will for sure exist. Of course if this they ability to make choices, technical or not, they are completely doomed.

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

#270

Post by skeeter2020 »

deaux wrote: post #243
InfraScaler wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

hey - devs aren' the only ones who fall in the premature optimization trap! Everyone from the CTO envisioning the scale of their future startup down to the IT intern is influenced by this, plus it's in the best interest of a dedicated infra guy to have a lot of dedicated infra. If you don't manage people K8s can become your kingdom and the size a badge of importance.
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