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My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

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Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#131

Post by tekla »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #49
wongarsu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RDS is very expensive. Just following the console's advise for production instances (meaning Multi-AZ with a Proxy), a t3-medium (2 vCPU, 4GB) Postgres instance with 5GB storage is $130/month. You can get it down to $12/month by going with a t4g.micro (2 vCPU, 1GB RAM), single-az, no proxy, no backups, 5GB storage; with price after that scaling roughly linearly with RAM. But the interface will scream at you the entir…

Ah, it makes sense why costs would be high in that case. Multi-AZ + proxy seems like massive overkill for 99% of applications though.

Multi-AZ is freaking awesome because the literal first 10 minutes I'm forced to give a shit about my RDS DB, its already a waste of money vs the monthly cost.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#132

Post by JohnBooty »

cyberpunk wrote: post #129
varispeed wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm sure you can guess - pure risk aversion. Your business idea is risky enough, and they would need engineers to assess your (possibly ever-changing) DIY stack.

You see the same thing in the corporate world for in-house stuff. Your manager (and your manager's manager) don't want to hear about in-house or self-hosted things that AWS can provide.

This is totally understandable. It's a repeat of the whole "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" mantra of computing's early decades.

It also totally sucks.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#133

Post by bastawhiz »

> Stripe: $0.00

I mean, unless you're running on processing credit, this is objectively not the case. You just don't see the cost because it's deducted before it hits your balance. It's easy to forget that payment processing is not free, and that creates a blind spot where you're kneecapping your revenue with inefficient ways of doing billing.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#134

Post by JohnBooty »

commonlisp94 wrote: post #103
quickthrower2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battle of the SaaSes! The challenge: Can you build a profitable SaaS without giving money to other SaaSes!

People used to make websites by uploading some php or perl scripts to a shared server (or just buying a domain and pointing it at their home ip). In that context, I can't imagine someone writing an article like this.

I think it's kind of sad and insane that people seem to have forgotten (or came into the industry too late to know) that it's possible to build fun and useful things that way.

I built a forum/social site that way back in the day and it was active and profitable for 10+ years.

It also feels like the art of optimization has been lost.

For small and medium sites a lot of today's crazy build pipeline and distributed asset hosting complexity can be sidestepped if you just focus on optimization and making sure that cache expiration dates for your assets are set correctly.

On the server side, it is considered "normal" these days to have maybe 50+ database queries per request. People then reach for expensive and complex database solutions (clustering, etc) before doing simple app-layer optimizations like caching.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#135

Post by esafak »

stewartmcgown wrote: post #29
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 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.

What's the best way to build and run a containerized PaaS on Hetzner?

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#136

Post by dlisboa »

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...

Similarly, but on the opposite spectrum, I also wonder how far you can go on vertical scaling nowadays. For 200 EUR/month on Hetzner you get a dedicated 80-core ARM CPU, 128GB ECC RAM, 2TB SSD...using a good performance multi-threaded language, what _can't_ you run on that? It's ridiculous value.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#137

Post by [deleted] »

wink wrote: post #107
TheCapeGreek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proba…

Not a 1Password fan, but if your business hinges on 3$/month you probably shouldn't do business.

[deleted]

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#138

Post by Propelloni »

dangus wrote: post #72
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.

> As long as you're willing to roll your own infrastructure Uh huh. This is why DevOps/SRE roles pay more than development roles. “Step 2: draw the rest of the owl”

They do? That's interesting news!

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#139

Post by esafak »

ljm wrote: post #122
qingcharles wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which k8s are you using and how are you managing it?

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#140

Post by freefaler »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #126
harshitaneja wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Both of them are french companies and from my experience with them if you need support is a hit or miss.
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