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My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

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Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#111

Post by julianeon »

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…

There are a lot of use cases for which you can’t actually save by kicking out Ahrefs. Of all the tools here it is the hardest one to replicate. I agree w the rest - but in many situations Ahrefs is not replaceable.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#112

Post by waylandsmithers »

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…

Agreed- I'd be interested if someone could figure out how to do this on $0 for some period of time on sign up credits and free tiers

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#113

Post by wahnfrieden »

styren wrote: post #15
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.

tawk.to

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#114

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

avinoth wrote: post #108

I wouldn't say this one to be frugal, but then frugality varies by different parameters. What they priortize (Eg: a dedicated marketing tool vs sending marketing through app itself), what their expertise in (hosting in vps vs aws vs heroku, etc), the type of service, team size and so on. As there are 10 ways to do the same thing all with a different tradeoffs. Being solo myself, I aim to keep my costs as low as possi…

I think the author here is prioritizing simplicity of deployments above all else, because he realizes time is money. The amount of time to build something VS paying to use an off the shelf item is an important decision to make, and I think the author made good decisions across the board

The author does come across more as a business/operations person first, developer second. Most developers would not consider tools like ahrefs or intercom or even realize that marketing is generally more difficult/important than the develpment work itself

Relatively speaking even at all these costs I would consider this to be frugal. If your a skilled developer you would easily be worth at least $100/hr

Taking off the shelf solutions with easy scalability of services for adding additional people operationally is important

time saved is time earned, time is money, and money saved is money earned

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#115

Post by Demiurge »

Should anything trial be considered "frugal"? The moment you run out of free tokens, you have to shut down or actually get frugal, which is the difficult part... Would you ever include "Photoshop trial" in a list of "frugal software I use for design"?

Why spend $300 in AWS credits to begin with, when you can use Hetzner, and switch to cloud when absolutely need to? (or shut down)

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#118

Post by marcosdumay »

jiriro wrote: post #98
intelVISA wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know what you're doing it's easy enough to roll out a multi-region distributed system with HA and backups on a pretty modest ( However, most people do not - some will learn, but most will fall for the cloud marketing depts and become infra renters for life. Teach a man to fish, and so on.

What is HA ?

It's a pretty common abbreviation of high availability on this context, with a heavy implication on active-passive redundancy (although the GP looks like an exception here). It's more used than the full wording, and part of the name of some important tools.

So, yeah, it's good that you asked, because it's not as widely known as the people that use it think it is.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#119

Post by sakopov »

> I use AWS EC2 for Waitlist's backend python webserver, RDS for the postgres database, S3 for file storage, and an Elastic IP

Honestly, if you're using AWS for VPS, S3 and RDS you're better off on something like DigitalOcean or no cloud at all.

Also, I don't understand using SendGrid and Sentry when you're already on AWS and have SES and CloudWatch. You could even connect CloudWatch with PagerDuty via alarms and milk their free tier to get notified when you have errors. You can use CloudWatch pretty extensively and still stay within the free tier and I think SES would be ~$10/mo at their volume.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#120

Post by qingcharles »

nordsieck wrote: post #47
stewartmcgown wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be CTO of an Uber Eats style service that ran on hosting costs of about £100pm. Thousands of orders every few days, real time driver tracking, self hosted invoice generation, the works. Hetzner servers, Docker Swarm and Cloudflare for the tech.

> Hetzner servers It is truly amazing to me the value that is provided by renting hardware instead of VPSes. As long as you're willing to roll your own infrastructure instead of buy into a cloud provider's infrastructure.

You'd be amazed how much you can get out of one of the Hetzner $3/mo ARM servers with the right code.

I use a $6/mo box for my primary business hosting, but I have a $3/mo one that I'm using to build v2, really just to prove what's possible. If you set up your DB and caching right you can do so much with so little...

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