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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

#371

Post by operatingthetan »

senko wrote: 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"…

When I was a consultant we would plan out 25 piece cloud deployments for little pie in the sky apps that would never see more than 200 users. Everyone has been trained that 'cloud' means a lot of expensive moving parts and doesn't stop to plan their deployments beyond that.

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

#372

Post by bilinguliar »

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…

Sqlite + Litestream for backups.

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

#373

Post by ryandrake »

dwedge wrote: post #296
wookmaster wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of people that got a CS degree and went to work and this is only a job for them, they have no interest outside of work. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people so I get off work troubleshooting issues to troubleshoot issues at home lol though there aren't that many just my choice to self host cameras through HomeKit sometimes falls apart somehow but im also squeezing every KB or RAM out of that beeli…

Don't get me wrong I don't think a homelab is necessary, but I think people who have only done this in a big corporate environment are doing themselves a disservice - either a small company or a homelab can fix that itch, but like you say a lot of people don't have the interest

It's like a developer who went straight from knowing nothing about programming to JavaScript and never looked back. They missed C, they missed assembly, they missed cycle counting, they missed knowing what your memory footprint is at all times in your application, they missed keeping your inner loops tight and in the cache... It's not just "oh this person doesn't have a nerdy hobby." These are real skill holes in [many] developers' backgrounds, just like knowing how to host something on bare metal+OS is a real skill hole for some devops people.

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

#374

Post by ryandrake »

Zetaphor wrote: post #368
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.

I once interviewed for a small print shop that was proudly throwing out every AWS product name when describing their stack. They serve a few hundred customers and their previous system worked for decades entirely over email and a web form. I decided I wasn't interested around the point where he explained how they're migrating to lambdas

LOL, I'm laughing and I wish it was because this was funny rather than terrifying.

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

#375

Post by shimman »

andersmurphy wrote: post #187
locknitpicker wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> SQLite on the same machine is akin to calling fwrite. Actually 35% faster than fwrite [1]. > This is also a system constraint as it forces a one-database-per-instance design You can scale incredibly far on a single node and have much better up time than github or anthropic. At this rate maybe even AWS/cloudflare. > you need to serve traffic beyond your local region Postgres still has a single node that can write. S…

May be an "out" there question, but any tech book suggestions you'd recommend that can teach an average dev on how to build highly performant software with minimal systems?

I feel like the advice from people with your experience is worth way way way way more than what you'd hear from big tech. Like what you said yourself, big tech tends to recommend extremely complicated systems that only seem worth maintaining if you have a trillion dollar monopoly behind it.

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

#376

Post by jayd16 »

cj wrote: post #365
jayd16 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So go live without testing the backup in the beta at all?

Yes! Why build a backup process before you know you have data worth backing up.

Why go live if you don't have a reasonable expectation of users?

Worrying about HA when you don't have customers that need it is one thing, but I wouldn't want to be in a place where I have to put a banner on the website asking users to please make a new account because we had an oopsie.

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

#377

Post by shimman »

pdhborges wrote: post #342
tl wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://antonz.org/sqlite-is-not-a-toy-database/ — 240K inserts per second on a single machine in 2021. The problem you describe is real, but the TPS ceiling is wrong by three orders of magnitude on modern hardware.

Do you know why it is a toy? Because in a real prod environment after inserting 240k rows per second for a while you have to deal with the fact that schema evolution is required. Good luck migrating those huge tables with Sqlite ALTER table implementation

This doesn't seem like a toy but you know... realizing different systems will have different constraints.

Not everyone needs monopolistic tech to do their work. There's probably less than 10,000 companies on earth that truly need to write 240k rows/second. For everyone else, we can focus on better things.

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

#378

Post by tremon »

cj wrote: post #365
jayd16 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So go live without testing the backup in the beta at all?

Yes! Why build a backup process before you know you have data worth backing up.

The data recovery process needs to be validated too, preferably before customer data actually needs to be recovered.

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

#379

Post by andersmurphy »

andriy_koval wrote: post #359
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] for inserts only into singe table with no indexes. Also, I didn't get why sqlite was allowed to do batching and pgsql was not.

> for inserts only into singe table with

Actually, there are no inserts in this example each transaction in 2 updates with a logical transaction that can be rolled back (savepoint). So in raw terms you are talking 200k updates per second and 600k reads per second (as there's a 75%/25% read/write mix in that example). Also worth keeping in mind updates are slower than inserts.

> no indexes.

The tables have an index on the primary key with a billion rows. More indexes would add write amplification which would affect both databases negatively (likely PG more).

> Also, I didn't get why sqlite was allowed to do batching and pgsql was not.

Interactive transactions [1] are very hard to batch over a network. To get the same effect you'd have to limit PG to a single connection (deafeating the point of MVCC).

- [1] An interactive transaction is a transaction where you intermingle database queries and application logic (running on the application).

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

#380

Post by operatingthetan »

AlexSalikov wrote: post #276

Similar approach here. I run a side project on Next.js + Vercel (free tier) + Neon Postgres (free tier). Total hosting cost: $0/month. The one place I'd push back on SQLite: if your app has any write concurrency from external processes (cron jobs, webhooks), WAL mode helps but you still hit lock contention. I have data collection scripts running every 30 minutes that write to the same DB the web app reads from. Postg…

I guess it depends on what it is, but the Vercel free tiers don't allow commercial projects. I have no idea if they actually check though.
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