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My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

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Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#181

Post by gochi »

anonzzzies wrote: post #174
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…

Is it bending backwards though? The problem is that saas solutions scale in cost as well, so when you grow you pay more. For a small startup, there is always a cut off where the price of the saas service(s) explode well over the utility but you are hooked and you can afford it now. But should you? Personally I enjoy profits and more profits are better. I cannot accept using tools that I don’t really need, but, at suc…

That doesn't apply when the cost is static (adhering to the above advice of dumping 1P).

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#182

Post by tracker1 »

pembrook wrote: post #155
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…

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…

It depends a lot on your time and experience... Also, what you want to know. There's no guarantees at all with a SaaS startup, and if you can increase your knowledge base at a minimal time sink it may be worth it. I have a dozen things I tinker with and no expectations, so I treat it more as a hobby.

I am spending about $140/mo on a dedicated server currently, mostly because I want to run my own mail server without depending on a relay host or nickel and dime costs ($2-10/mo per address). This now runs just about everything I use. Nearly all my apps are dockerized so I can port them to another host pretty easily.

I've also been playing with writing for Cloudflare directly (workers & pages) as well as CockroachLabs (CockroachDB Cloud). Both with relatively low startup pricing and can grow as needed based on usage/demand, both with a relatively clean self-host strategy as an exit.

It would be too easy for me to wind up paying $20-30/month or more on a dozen or more projects. I try to keep this down, as if I don't touch something for a month, or don't complete it for a year, it adds up quick... If I keep baseline costs low, it's less of an issue.

If I was 20 years younger, I'd probably have gotten more of these things done or put more effort in. The tech costs are a lot better today than 25-30 years ago when I was starting out. But I'm still pretty mindful of it.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#185

Post by system2 »

galactus wrote: post #55
creshal wrote: post #19

Why shell out for 1password with its history of security problems when bitwarden is free?

What history of security problems?

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-2111...

It is cloud software. I expect them to get hacked sooner or later.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#186

Post by ZephyrBlu »

waitlist wrote: post #162
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.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say? I have no idea what your 1M requests are doing. They could be 1M requests for static HTML. It does make the monthly costs seem a bit more understandable, but 1M/24hrs is still only ~12 RPS.

Btw my comment wasn't an insult, "hosted email list" genuinely seems like the primary functionality and I wouldn't have expected it to use many resources.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#187

Post by tracker1 »

freefaler wrote: post #140
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been pretty happy with my OVH server, but agreed on support... had better luck with chatgpt and a lot of additional reading getting my CIDR block of addresses configured under ProxMox (which made me far less worried about ChatGPT taking my job any time soon).

In the end, was an interesting learing experience, that I hope to not have to repeat. Only went for a single server as I had several smaller VPSes on DigitalOcean and wanted to add a mail server in the mix, and couldn't reliably send via DO or Linode, so was easier to consolidate and run on a single/larger host for hobby projects.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#188

Post by freefaler »

Balladeer wrote: post #170
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.

> 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.

For your basic needs you'd need:

1. a DNS monitoring with failover (DNSMadeeasy has a decent solution)

2. a Haproxy setup with health checks for switching to a working upstream service

3. a distributed filesystem

4. a master-slave replication with monitoring (something like Mariadb + orchestrator service)

and nightly backups for all this. Database and FS are latency sensitive so they shouldn't be too far apart.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#189

Post by nordsieck »

dlisboa wrote: post #136
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...

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.

> what _can't_ you run on that? It's ridiculous value.

Yeah - I remember a StackOverflow talk[1] where they basically said that they just vertically scale their database.

The fact that they were able to make it work tells me that most businesses should probably just go that route and avoid the headache of distributed systems[2].

---

1. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/stack-exchange/

2. Obviously a business should probably invest in redundancy when it comes to data (as did StackOverflow), but a pure "Raid 1" setup is the easiest of distributed systems to understand.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#190

Post by suralind »

esafak wrote: post #139
ljm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Talos Linux is great.
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