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My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

getwaitlist.com

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Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#11

Post by thecodrr »

I would NOT call this frugal at all, actually. You are overspending in a lot of places and under spending in others. $281.32 per month for such a simple service is...astonishing. Change Vercel and Intercom with Cloudflare and Chatwoot (self hosted), and you have saved $120/mo. Get rid of Ahrefs for Ubersuggest (or no SEO tool at all) to save about $80 more. That leaves you with $81.32/mo. If you try even harder, you can easily bring that under $50.

But I get it. If X tool saves time, why not pay for it? I wouldn't call that frugal though because you are still spending where you can save.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#12

Post by bauerd »

MadDemon wrote: post #9
bauerd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use GA because Plausible costs 9 Euros a month

I was referring to "There's also no consent banner, so this doesn't seem GDPR compliant". They explicitly state that they are GDPR compliant without the need for a consent banner.

How is this relevant if the website in question does not use Plausible?

Edit: If you mean this is stated in the blog post, I can't find it

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#13

Post by zvolsky »

bauerd wrote: post #3

>Google Analytics >No surprises here. I used to use Plausible, but that costs money and you can't beat free. Monthly cost: $0. Thanks hard pass. I checked and Plausible starts from 9 Euros a month. This is hardly what I'd consider advertising material. But likely I'm just not their target audience. There's also no consent banner, so this doesn't seem GDPR compliant Edit: I must have phrased this in a confusing way. T…

Even if you are using Google Analytics, you can skip the consent banner by denying on behalf of the user. GA will then update your counters without doing anything that would require consent.

  ad_storage='denied'

  > Requests are sent through a different domain to avoid previously set third-party cookies from being sent in request headers.
  > Google Analytics will not read or write Google Ads cookies, and Google signals features will not accumulate data for this traffic.
  > IP addresses are used to derive IP country, but are never logged by our Google Ads and Floodlight systems and are immediately deleted upon collection. Note: Google Analytics collects IP addresses as part of normal internet communications.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9976101?hl=en

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#14

Post by ZephyrBlu »

> I use AWS EC2 for Waitlist's backend python webserver, RDS for the postgres database, S3 for file storage, and an Elastic IP. I use T2 and T3 instances. My AWS bill would be $200-300 a month

Seems like a high bill for what sounds like basically a hosted email list? I would have expected compute and storage costs to be very low.

E: This was NOT a point about how cloud costs are ridiculous. Even for cloud this seems high.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#15

Post by styren »

thecodrr wrote: post #11

I would NOT call this frugal at all, actually. You are overspending in a lot of places and under spending in others. $281.32 per month for such a simple service is...astonishing. Change Vercel and Intercom with Cloudflare and Chatwoot (self hosted), and you have saved $120/mo. Get rid of Ahrefs for Ubersuggest (or no SEO tool at all) to save about $80 more. That leaves you with $81.32/mo. If you try even harder, you…

Instead of Intercom I can recommend crisp.chat which has a free tier if you can live with only 2 seats.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#16

Post by MadDemon »

thecodrr wrote: post #11

I would NOT call this frugal at all, actually. You are overspending in a lot of places and under spending in others. $281.32 per month for such a simple service is...astonishing. Change Vercel and Intercom with Cloudflare and Chatwoot (self hosted), and you have saved $120/mo. Get rid of Ahrefs for Ubersuggest (or no SEO tool at all) to save about $80 more. That leaves you with $81.32/mo. If you try even harder, you…

How does Ubersuggest compare to Ahrefs?

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#17

Post by TheCapeGreek »

thecodrr wrote: post #11

I would NOT call this frugal at all, actually. You are overspending in a lot of places and under spending in others. $281.32 per month for such a simple service is...astonishing. Change Vercel and Intercom with Cloudflare and Chatwoot (self hosted), and you have saved $120/mo. Get rid of Ahrefs for Ubersuggest (or no SEO tool at all) to save about $80 more. That leaves you with $81.32/mo. If you try even harder, you…

I agree.

Use one of the OSS password managers to save on 1P. If you have a cloud sync service you already use, KeePassXC + cloud sync will solve having the passwords available everywhere you are. You can even use Syncthing for free (though I'd at least donate once off) since you can use it peer-to-peer between your devices.

SEO really needs disruption here on price. Ubersuggest seems decent.

On Intercom: OP can probably go into more detail on why Intercom's widget is so much better. If it's just animations and UX, then yeah go find some alternative or self host.

What's useful in the self-hosting space is finding either a tool to manage server provisioning & management (e.g. Ploi), or a hosting provider that makes it easy to install (e.g. DO marketplace). Then you're only spending a small fee on the management and only spending on hosting cost (which for a long time can be negligible).

Spending some time to DIY with reliable tools (automated where possible) is IMO still preferable to spending this much money if starting from scratch.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#20

Post by wongarsu »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #14

> I use AWS EC2 for Waitlist's backend python webserver, RDS for the postgres database, S3 for file storage, and an Elastic IP. I use T2 and T3 instances. My AWS bill would be $200-300 a month Seems like a high bill for what sounds like basically a hosted email list? I would have expected compute and storage costs to be very low. E: This was NOT a point about how cloud costs are ridiculous. Even for cloud this seems…

> except it's free because I got $5,000 in credits from AWS Activate

Free credits are the ingenious marketing ploy of all big clouds to delay price comparisons until some amount of lock-in is achieved. Sure, you could likely host it for 1/10th to 1/5th of the cost elsewhere. But then you would have to pay from the get-go, and on AWS it's free™ (until it isn't)

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