Interesting, thanks for sharing . Especially Ahref, Intercom and at some point the AWS bill make up the vast majority of the expenses. Chatwool on Railway for 5$/month would probably do the trick instead of intercom. At first glance 200-300$ per month for AWS once your credit runs out seems like _way_ too much. If I understand your product correctly then you serve customizable widgets for signup campaigns and persist the emails with some metadata for analytics in a database. I would like to be proven wrong but to me that sounds like a 29$/month supabase pro bill or a 20$/month neon.tech bill if you like managed services. Or given the numbers on the landing page this should(!) easily be doable with a hetzer server for about 30$/month. Depending on the exact usage Cloudflare R2 might also be significantly cheaper than AWS S3.
My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
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Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#32I can’t imagine Intercom is worth like 1/3 of the budget. I’ve never used one of those AI pop ups and have always felt them annoying
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#33FYI: Google Domains is a discontinued service: https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670?hl=en
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#34>Google Analytics >No surprises here. I used to use Plausible, but that costs money and you can't beat free. Monthly cost: $0. Thanks hard pass. I checked and Plausible starts from 9 Euros a month. This is hardly what I'd consider advertising material. But likely I'm just not their target audience. There's also no consent banner, so this doesn't seem GDPR compliant Edit: I must have phrased this in a confusing way. T…
> There's also no consent banner, so this doesn't seem GDPR compliant Plausible uses this one weird trick where they don't use cookies and don't store PII, and thus don't need consent (neither for cookies nor for GDPR). You lose some data because you can't track users across visits, but you gain accuracy (because you can track every visit, not just people who agree) and don't have to annoy your visitors.
So… www logs. That weird trick they have been using since 1994 or earlier!
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#35I 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…
Battle of the SaaSes! The challenge: Can you build a profitable SaaS without giving money to other SaaSes!
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#36I 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…
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Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#37I would say technology wise, you don't need to launch with more than a VM for hosting if frugality is important to you. That way your costs don't explode. I would put the rest of my money into the sales pipeline. I think the requirements for initial scale are usually grossly overestimated, and the throughput of a simple $30 VM underestimated. Unless I built my stack out of mollasses, or I was anticipating 1000s of concurrent users, concurrent being the important part, then I wouldn't touch cloud stuff personally.
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#38Love this! I published a similar one last month:
https://buttondown.email/stack
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A couple notes on where I differ/concur from OP:
1. ahrefs is absolutely worth its price in gold.
2. IMHO intercom is overpriced relative to competitors depending on how you use it, with the caveat that I hate in-app messaging widgets and consider them a blight on the modern web. (HelpScout is my preferred app.)
3. I deeply miss my Free AWS Credits Era.
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#39> GitHub Be careful with using their CI tho, even if it's good, you hit the limit quite fast (especially storage, not minutes; and they don't report properly where the storage expenditure comes, so it's very frustrating).
What kind of storage limit is there? What are you storing?
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#40> 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…
They could be over-provisioned. AWS does provide recommendations if you are though.