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My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

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Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#121

Post by dml2135 »

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…

Would you be able to share what your products are? I'd love to host a small service like this, but struggle to come up with something that would be both useful and profitable at a small scale.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#122

Post by ljm »

qingcharles wrote: post #120
nordsieck wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Those ARM boxes are incredible for the price, I'm using them to document a hobby K8S cluster because the overall cost is low enough that it won't price a hobbyist out.

You get a lot of bang for your buck out of them.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#124

Post by pphysch »

"Frugal" and "subscribing to dozens of SaaS" does not make much sense to me. What happens when these SaaS inevitably hike their rates (or go under).

To be fair, I assume the gameplan here is to exit ASAP, so we don't even need a 5 year plan. "Opex" doesn't even really exist. It's all about investing capital in a successful exit.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#125

Post by avinoth »

dml2135 wrote: post #121
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…

Would you be able to share what your products are? I'd love to host a small service like this, but struggle to come up with something that would be both useful and profitable at a small scale.

Sure. Broadly this is the list. Many of these are my go-to's for all my products. Only the Project management, I had to keep trying new things. Most favorite for now is Trello.

Also, I use dokku for deployment, so it's very similar to heroku and uses heroku buildpacks.

Hetzner - Servers.

Helpscout - Customer helpdesk

Google - workspace Email

Github - Source code

Airbrake - Error monitoring

Posthog - Analytics

Shortcut - Project management

Canny - Feedback & Changelog announcement

Stoplight - API documentation

Slack - For app testing

UptimeRobot - Uptime monitoring

MRR - For subscription tracking

Mailgun - Transactional Emails

Reform - One time used for feedback collection

Calendly - Call bookings

Paddle - Payment platform

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#126

Post by Tijdreiziger »

harshitaneja wrote: post #97
nordsieck wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hetzner is great and I love it and use it for all my dev needs. But there availability is in limited zones and for production I do suffer from the latency. Haven't found any other provider which costs anywhere near the same(every comparable server is at least 2x the cost). I use their AX41-NVME. Any suggestions of an alternate?

Maybe OVH or Scaleway?

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#127

Post by rozenmd »

Demiurge wrote: post #115

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)

OnlineOrNot wouldn't exist without AWS's free tier.

I used Lambda + RDS knowing I had a year before it would cost me anything - luckily I found paying customers before that day came.

I was unwilling to risk having a side project sit there idle and cost me $30/mo or so. I imagine there are hundreds if not thousands of small businesses that started the same way.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#128

Post by nik736 »

niemandhier wrote: post #53
nordsieck wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I did that once and the data center burned down. Sure I could have the service spread over several centers and build distributed backups etc. In the end self hosting and self managing is a money / time trade off, especially for a side gig I’d us SAS and managed solutions. The one thing one has to make sure off is to not get locked in with a particular provider, so knowing how to do everything yourself is a very valua…

A Google Cloud region in France was also unavailable for months (or still is?) due to flooding/electricity. But no one is talking about it.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#129

Post by cyberpunk »

varispeed wrote: post #105
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.

Another reason is that if you look for an investor, one of the first things they ask is how / where you host it. If it is anything remotely DIY you'll be turned down. It was actually painful to see start ups spending thousands a month on hosting, that could be easily achieved as you say under 100 pcm plus. They would have to get a contractor to set it up and for support, but it would have worked out much cheaper and…

> If it is anything remotely DIY you'll be turned down.

Why is that?

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