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

stevehanov.ca

481–490 of 539 posts

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

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What features postgres offers over sqlite in the context of running on a single machine with a monolithic app The same thing SQL itself buys you: flexibility for unforeseen use cases and growth. Your SQLite benchmark is based in having just one write connection for SQLite but all eight writable connections for Postgres. Even in the context of a single app, not everyone wants to be tied down that way, particularly w…

In what way is a single writer tying you down? It's so much easier to work with and scales so much better than postgres connections

It scales right up.

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

#483

> 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…

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…

Interesting comparison. Have you done one for sqlite vs H2? Since you're using clojure, it seems a natural fit. According to what I've read, H2 is faster than sqlite, but it would be interesting to see some up to date numbers on it.

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

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not anticipating everything ahead of time, I'm choosing mature tech that does what I need and then some. There's no misstep there. The real problem I've seen with choosing software tech is "new, shiny".

That's fine, so long as your aware of the costs of that decision. That choice is what tends towards a"minimum prod deployment" consisting of something like a pair of app servers behind a load balance with a pair of redundant databases behind them and usually some sort of object store as well. Assuming you engineer you app and db schemas sanely, you can reliably get four nine out of a setup like that. On AWS that look…

For most things I personally use AWS Lambda and S3, with some SimpleDB. If I needed something more in the DB department, I'd probably use DynamoDB, but S3 actually works well for most of the data I need to store. I pay about $0.50/mo and most of that is S3 cost for media files. I don't have a lot of users, but even if I did I'd still be paying way less than $20/mo. And when I do have a lot of users, I don't have to worry about scaling anything (and that will happen soon). I think the first million Lambda invocations are free, and if/when I start paying for Lambda invocations, the AWS costs will definitely be covered easily by user subscriptions.

I also use pretty much the same stack at work, where we currently have about 150,000 users. The cost is about $15/day, mostly in S3 costs, we have a lot more data at my day job. We also do use a few hundred EC2 instances in short bursts, and the VPC has stupid high costs, and other costs add up, but it's probably about 1% of what the rest of the teams cost that run on EC2 and Postgres and other AWS tech.

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

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what percentage of services run on the Internet exceed a few hundred transactions per second.

I’ve seen multimillion dollar “enterprise” projects get no where close to that. Of course, they all run on scalable, cloud native infrastructure costing at least a few grand a month.

> a few grand a month.

A negligible cost for a successful tech business that also works when your requirements exceed the capabilities of a single VPS.

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

#486

> 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…

> I put Proxmox on it [...]

How, exactly? Doesn't it require phyiscal access to the server?

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

#487
I don’t get the copilot part.

Opus 4.6 is a 3x multiplier as per GH pricing (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/copilot-...) so each request costs 0.12$ not 0.04$, and if using the fast mode opus 4.6 then it’s 30x so 1.20$/request.

How does the author get 0.04$ per?

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

#488
post #263
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As a student you might be living in a 6sqm dorm with shared bathroom and a kitchen for 400 USD a month. You get a job paying you 200k afterwards.

Why would you change where you live if it works?

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

#489

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.

Yes, the free tier is for hobby projects. But even if I upgrade to Pro, it still fits the $20/month tech stack from the original post.

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

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well continuous attempts definitely bogged down my desktop pretty bad. Also, getting OOM on a 64gb machine multiple times a day is quiet annoying. And one simple mistake, and we're screwed

If sshd is OOMing on 64GB something else is going on…

Well, after changing the ssh port to something really big, OOM and heavy CPU usage stopped, as I was still using that public IP, so concluded it was not an inside job .

There were like thousands of requests in an hour, and that went on continuously, before I changed the port.

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