Why shell out for 1password with its history of security problems when bitwarden is free?
and even if you do go for the paid version, it's much cheaper too
Bitwarden also has an OSS backend that you can self-host.
My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
41–50 of 219 posts
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#42Great list, but AWS bill will run pretty high when you'll finish your credits.
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.
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#43> 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
My guess is that RDS is eating up the cost here?
I've been using Litestream on datasciencesouth.com - it has flaws but if you can get away with it, it's much cheaper than RDS.
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#44> 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…
I am sure there are numerous services costing $5-10/mo that would cover this and I would certainly consider that to eliminate the hosting and maintenance cost.
If I had to build it, I would expect using Lambda, DynamoDb and S3 would likely bring the hosting cost to down to a couple of a dollars a month max.
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#45It would be nice if we can see a breakdown of P&L. I see the indie dev claims to have “over 7500+ businesses” as customers. But also a very generous free tier.
I see the post is getting eviscerated in the comment section. But if this person is spending mere cents in operating costs when compared to the profit earned each month or year (I think in business terms this is known as customer acquisition costs). Then I would say that is truly “frugal”
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> except it's free because I got $5,000 in credits from AWS Activate Free credits are the ingenious marketing ploy of all big clouds to delay price comparisons until some amount of lock-in is achieved. Sure, you could likely host it for 1/10th to 1/5th of the cost elsewhere. But then you would have to pay from the get-go, and on AWS it's free™ (until it isn't)
I meant that even for hosting in the cloud it seems high. I have a hard time understanding where the cost is coming from. I can only assume it's because of the DB as opposed to the instance or S3. I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 10x cheaper if you didn't use cloud hosting.
Database costs are very high.
I am not sure I know the reason behind it honestly.
Either you go with something like Dynamodb or planetscale or the least you pay is 40€/m using AWS Aurora serverless.
As soon as databases start to charge for computing time the cost balloon out of reach of hobby projects.
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#47I 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.
> 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.
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> except it's free because I got $5,000 in credits from AWS Activate Free credits are the ingenious marketing ploy of all big clouds to delay price comparisons until some amount of lock-in is achieved. Sure, you could likely host it for 1/10th to 1/5th of the cost elsewhere. But then you would have to pay from the get-go, and on AWS it's free™ (until it isn't)
I meant that even for hosting in the cloud it seems high. I have a hard time understanding where the cost is coming from. I can only assume it's because of the DB as opposed to the instance or S3. I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 10x cheaper if you didn't use cloud hosting.
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 entire time that this isn't reasonable for a production setup.
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant that even for hosting in the cloud it seems high. I have a hard time understanding where the cost is coming from. I can only assume it's because of the DB as opposed to the instance or S3. I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 10x cheaper if you didn't use cloud hosting.
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.
Re: My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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!
Basically. Except that htaccess logs won't correctly track page visits on your fancy react page, so you still need a bit of JavaScript.
And once you have that you can also track visit time a bit better, or track goal conversions like how often people click some specific button. But other than that it's basically a more modern webalizer.