Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

getwaitlist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 219 posts

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#161

Post by eddieroger »

As someone not deep in the startup game, it's interesting to me to see what others are doing for their stacks, so I appreciate this being shared. Two things stood out to me from this list more than anything else.

First, the author is clearly a hustler, as many of these definitely-not-cheap services are being paid for under free credits. Cheers to them for that. If AWS is willing to give someone $5000 to get going, take it and run. I do think that makes it slightly disingenuous to then say one is running their business on the cheap, but if they can get profitable before that well dries up, who really cares and no one is hurt.

Second, and I saw this theme in the comments as well, if these are valuable services, they're worth investing in. SaaS uptime is definitely important, and it would be a silly risk to self-host such a thing. Frugal is a good way of looking at it, but if these tools help ultimately make money, they're worth paying for. I think that ties in to point 1, where the free services are meant to help you prove that out while also entrenching you slightly if it holds. But as someone who is notorious for yak shaving, being able to shove code out the door and not worry about the rest of it is deeply appealing and worth the gamble.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#162

Post by waitlist »

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…

We're much more than a hosted email list. We field over a million requests on a normal day.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#163

Post by waitlist »

sakopov wrote: post #119

> 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 mil…

Blog author here. I'll be downgrading from Sendgrid to SES in the foreseeable future.

Sentry is a great product, CloudWatch is a real pain to use.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#164

Post by notpushkin »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #75
xyst wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those “free” credits on these cloud providers are akin to how drug dealers sell unadulterated product in small amounts to new users to get them hooked. Then repeat business is the cut product with high markup.

The big brained maneuver is probably to build a cloud agnostic stack and migrate between these clouds, negotiating free credits as you go. Done right you could probably pay no cloud bills for several years. The problem is that one does not simply build “cloud agnostic” services and you would probably spend a not insignificant amount of time migrating between them every year or two. But if you were really good at clou…

> one does not simply build “cloud agnostic” services

Why? From personal experience, everything I do is either:

- a static site, which you can run on anything from Netlify to some static CDN to GitLab Pages to a potato, or

- a bunch of Docker containers, which I usually run on Docker Swarm on any random VPS, and manage with my own little tool, https://lunni.dev/; AWS of course has some “cloud native” options for that, too (ECS + Fargate?), but I find predictable monthly bill a bit better on my nerves.

This and some S3-compatible storage do wonders for me.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#166

Post by seb_patron »

waitlist wrote: post #158
edfletcher_t137 wrote: post #92

Given that a large portion of this spend is currently covered by expiring (in less-than-a-year) one-time credits, it's really not representative of what it claims to be and is therefore quite disingenuous & misleading.

[flagged]

I found the blog post to be very useful as someone who is in the process of building a product! I’m very interested in how you extended the AWS Activate Credits- was it difficult getting AWS to extend the credits over 3 years?

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#167

Post by fragmede »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #156
pembrook wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does nobody here see the irony in bending over backwards to avoid spending money on software products when the entire purpose of your business is to sell a software product? I could see if we were talking about a side project with no commercial intent. But this post is about an indie Saas founder...if a few hundred dollars a month is a barrier to success, then that's a pretty good sign your indie startup isn't starti…

I think it’s just because it’s described as “frugal”.

That's just being nice. We developers are a right bunch of cheap bastards. At least I am. I'm working on it, but it's just so ingrained and pervasive, it's weird. I've been trying to figure out where it comes from for a while now, and how to get people to work past it, with little success.

If there was a magic debugger that made debugging 100x easier and faster, but it wasn't free and open source, I'd still have a hard time using it even though it would save me a bunch of time, and easily pay for itself in time and frustration saved.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#168

Post by waitlist »

seb_patron wrote: post #166
waitlist wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I found the blog post to be very useful as someone who is in the process of building a product! I’m very interested in how you extended the AWS Activate Credits- was it difficult getting AWS to extend the credits over 3 years?

AWS Activate Credits conventionally run for one or two years, and then expire. Contrary to popular belief, you are eligible for additional credits afterwards, but they have to be greater than your previous grant. So you can't have a $5K grant and then another $5K grant, for example. If you want to stack them effectively, you (for example) get a $5K grant, wait until it runs out, then a $10K grant, and then a $25K grant if you can get one.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#169

Post by fragmede »

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 stands for High Availability, so that one of the regions can completely fail, for whatever reason, and the site will still stay up.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#170

Post by Balladeer »

intelVISA wrote: post #85
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.

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.

> some will learn, but most will fall for the cloud marketing depts and become infra renters for life

Do you have any learning recommendations for someone looking to start down this path? I've only ever worked in an infra-renter context, and I've begun exploring the 'rent from Hetzner, manage your own infra' for personal projects, but I would love to learn from the paths of experts where possible.

Post reply on HN