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My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

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Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#201

Post by happytiger »

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…

The issue has less to do with not spending on software when your starting a software startup that it does the use of the term Frugal.

That implies bare minimum spend not splurge-in-just-a-few-areas cost to time savings benefit analysis.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#202

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

julianeon wrote: post #171
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it provide that is so special?

Its provides detailed analytics on the popularity of different websites and the keywords that people search for; it goes really, really deep on this, much deeper than you can go through manual google searches and various scripts. You can easily recreate Vercel on your own if you're willing to forgo some convenience, for example; there's no equivalent to that for Ahrefs - you can't realistically 'roll your own' or cod…

I'm not sure I buy that. Surely ahrefs is depending on the data that Google provides and if that is the case, there can be a competitor.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#203

Post by fhd2 »

fragmede wrote: post #172
fhd2 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree, but I'd say it depends. I'm not too surprised that software developers are less likely to spend money on software - they do have another option non-programmers don't have. I'd also not be shocked to hear that trained accountants starting a company are less likely to hire accounting firms than non-accountants. And most software I deal with isn't exactly free of opportunity cost - I dabbled a bit wit…

Yes, but shouldn't I be making more even money by using these services to optimize those other things? If, say, Calendly helps me get booked for appointments, appointments that wouldn't have happened without that app, then isn't that spending money to make money?

If you think so, it's probably true. That's why I can't really disagree with parent :D

I find the cost and value of tooling options quite difficult to fully grasp, it often comes down to gut feeling IMO.

What I would want to caution folks for is that the cost of a tool is not only what it actually costs. It's also the amount of time that has to be invested into usage, and potentially migrating to something else a while down the line in case of discontinuation, disappearing capabilities, new requirements, ToS or pricing changes, ...

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#204

Post by gochi »

callalex wrote: post #191
gochi wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don’t understand what you mean by static in this context. 1Password costs more when you have more employees.

Two things: the first is that it's easier to estimate costs with services like 1P due to it being mostly static, unlike other services where costs are quite dynamic ranging from different factors like usage and hours spent. The second is that once you reach that scale (more than 10 members), your costs are so large on personnel alone that $10/person is an absurdity to be frugal about when it can save you time.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#205

Post by xyst »

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…

Spinnaker project was supposed to make multi-cloud somewhat feasible. Assuming your application stack was fully "cloud native" with none to minimal vendor lock in to specific cloud provider products.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#206

Post by dlisboa »

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?

Vultr has some very cheap offerings and maybe worth a look. I can't speak to their reliability or service, but they have DCs everywhere even in South America and Africa where there are few cloud options outside of AWS. They're more expensive than Hetzner, maybe even a little over your 2x range depending on your load, but if latency is your issue they probably got you covered.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#207

Post by throw10920 »

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…

> 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?

No, because nobody thinks that it'll happen to them. Their company's/startup's/side project's product will be worth paying money for, and surely nobody's going to try to start an open-source product that will compete with them.

It's always somebody else.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#208

Post by DeathArrow »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #153
withinboredom wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that hard to install netdata? It's a single command. It is really no different than managing VPS's, in all honesty (just less expensive and tangible). I spend less than one hour a week doing updates and routine maintenance. Drive failures happen rarely, and can usually be swapped out within a few hours (this is what RAID is for). More time is spent dealing with k8s and it's shenanigans than dealing with…

> It is really no different than managing VPS Many people don't do that. My company uses EKS and we just send dockerfiles and yaml files at it. We don't ever actually interface with an ssh prompt on our servers

Managing Kubernetes doesn't take time?

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#209

Post by TheCapeGreek »

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…

I think others have addressed your comment well, but I'll add my 2c:

I think it's more about minimising the cost with effective alternatives rather than just taking whatever the "brand name VC startup/scaleup" is in the space and forking over hundreds of dollars.

You will more likely always have to spend money to make money, I agree. But if starting from nothing, having an immediate -$200/month (up to $500+ once the free credits run out) before you actually make any money does not sound like a good time.

Also take into account when running multiple such projects. Survivorship bias in our space is real, and it takes a lot of hits to "make it big". That can easily pile up to thousands for a handful of projects while none of them get near break-even before you go bankrupt.

All it takes is finding a good-enough alternative in the space, or if you trust the software enough to self-host, do that.

There's nothing wrong with actually trying to be frugal. We're supposed to have the skills to be more self-sufficient in this space, and I don't think it's a negative to want to actually do so. And neither is paying for something if you feel the premium is worth it.

Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)

#210

Post by nextaccountic »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #91
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'm working on a middle-tier solution for this gap -- I call it Nimbus, but basically the idea is to provide managed services at low cost cloud prices . There's no reason someone should have to run a service like Chatwoot themselves, the software is so good that it's mostly set & forget for most small use cases. That's where I come in. Unfortunately I don't have ChatWoot yet, but I have (and use) Umami for page view…

do you anticipate that hosted umami will have features unavailable in the open source version?
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