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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

#331

Post by deniska »

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.

I help my dad run a proxmox setup on a server he's got from a local craigslist analog and put on a co-location in a datacenter. It only uses a single public IP. All VMs are in a "virtual intranet", and the host itself acts like a router (giving local IP addresses to VMs via dnsmasq, routing VM internet access via NAT, forwarding specific outside ports to specific VMs). For example ports 80, 443 are given to a dedicated "nginx vm" which then will route a request to a specific VM depending on the hostname.

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

#332

Post by runako »

locknitpicker wrote: post #307
rovr138 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, you wait. Like everyone's been doing for years in the internet and still do - When AWS/GCP goes down, how do most handle HA? - When a database server goes down, how do most handle HA? - When Cloudflare goes down, how do most handle HA? The down time here is the server crashed, routing failed or some other issue with the host. You wait. One may run pingdom or something to alert you.

> When AWS/GCP goes down, how do most handle HA? This is a disingenuous scenario. SQLite doesn't buy you uptime if you deploy your app to AWS/GCP, and you can just as easily deploy a proper RDBMS such as postgres to a small provider/self-host. Do you actually have any concrete scenario that supports your belief?

> SQLite doesn't buy you uptime if you deploy your app to AWS/GCP

This is...not true of many hyperscaler outages? Frequently, outages will leave individual VMs running but affect only higher-order services typically used in more complex architectures. Folks running an SQLite on a EC2 often will not be affected.

And obviously, don't use us-east-1. This One Simple Trick can improve your HA story.

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

#333

Post by ZeWaren »

I run a dozen PHP (Laravel) / MySQL / Redis apps on a single server which cost 45€ per month.

Applications each have their own FreeBSD jails, so they're isolated.

ZFS incremental replication on top of regular app backups provide a quick recovery process should the hardware of that machine fail.

Moving those apps to the cloud would cost orders of magnitude more, for benefits I don't need.

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

#334

Post by ufocia »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #112
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.

I think we have to re-think and re-evaluate RAM usage on modern systems that use swapping with CPU-assisted page compression and fast, modern NVMe drives. The Macbook Neo with 8GB RAM is a showcase of how people underistimated its capabilities due to low amount of RAM before launch, yet after release all the reviewers point to a larger set of capabilities without any issues that people didn't predict pre-launch.

Memory compression sounds like going back to DOS days. I think we're better off with writing tighter more performant code with no YAGNI. Alas, vibe coding will probably not get us there anytime soon.

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

#335

Post by dwa3592 »

>>The optimal strategy is simple: write brutally detailed prompts with strict success criteria (which is best practice anyway), tell the agent to "keep going until all errors are fixed," hit enter, and go make a coffee while Satya Nadella subsidizes your compute costs.

100% agreed.

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

#336

Post by deaux »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #270
deaux wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In this case I think it was a bit of CTO envisioning scale, then a bit of CTO genuinely overestimating what is needed, plus a good amount of CTO just being the average nerdy dev who likes the idea of shiny toys and cool sounding stuff - "we're running on k8s!".

A year or so after I left they ran out of money. They would've lasted longer if the infra guy would've just stayed the backend guy and helped get projects done more quickly instead of shiny k8s setups for projects with a dozen end-users per day. Recently I saw that the CTO has started a new startup - and ironically the only guy who he took with him onto the new team looks to have been the infra guy!

I don't blame infra guy, he genuinely believed he was doing the right thing.

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

#337

Post by pontussw »

estetlinus wrote: post #195
taffydavid wrote: post #149

> I bought a GitHub Copilot subscription in 2023, plugged it into standard VS Code, and never left. I tried Cursor and the other fancy forks when they briefly surpassed it with agentic coding, but Copilot Chat always catches up. > 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 spe…

The author refers to gpt 4o and sonnet 3.5 as SOTA. I’d take the AI tips with a grain of salt tbh. But I’d love it if it’s true

It works with all models, some have a cost multiplier like Opus 4.6 ”charges” 3 requests per prompt, but its still only for the prompts you send yourself - even if it works on the issue for hours. GPT-5.4 has no multiplier i.e. costs 0.04$ per prompt.

Worth noting however that they are starting to introduce rate limits lately so you might struggle to run multiple concurrent sessions, though this is very inconsistent for me. Some days I can run 3-4 sessions concurrently all day, other times I get rate limited if I run one non-stop..

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

#339

Post by nchmy »

eurleif wrote: post #119
iLoveOncall wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you comparing PostgreSQL to an in-memory SQLite instead of a file-based one? Wow, memory is faster than disk, who would have thought?

Because it doesn't make a difference, because `SELECT 1` doesn't need to touch the database: Running 100,000 `SELECT 1` queries: PostgreSQL (localhost): 2.71 seconds SQLite (in-memory): 0.07 seconds SQLite (tempfile): 0.07 seconds ( https://gist.github.com/leifkb/d8778422d450d9a3f103ed43258cc... )

How about pg on Unix socket?

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

#340

Post by yoaso »

sgarland wrote: post #225
yoaso wrote: post #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 developme…

It doesn’t sound like OP was optimizing anything; it sounds like they just knew how to use that stack, and so are able to get customer validation while also spending very little per month.

Fair point. Stack selection is mostly about what you already know. I chose managed services not because I optimized for it, but because that's the stack I'm comfortable with. That said, my real point was simpler: whatever stack you pick, figure out who's going to pay for it before you spend time on infrastructure decisions.
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