Ask HN: Is a back end worth $35/mo?

Hi all, I am trying to get some side hustles started lately and want to min-max my cost and effort while doing so (broke college student already working 20h per week). For one of my apps I use payload as the CMS since it is the only cms which is real OSS without locking away core features like strapi and all the other cash-grab "freemium" CMS vendors do. Today the team released their cloud service starting at 35$ per month but I can get a VPS of similar specs at around 20$/month. So my question: Do you think self-hosting is generally worth 15 bucks a month? How much hours per month should I consider for self hosting when making my decision? Is just a backend really worth 35$? How much do you guys pay for your CMS/backend?

Yes.

A backend most definitely is worth 35 mere dollars. Though (you guessed it) it depends. It depends what you are going to do with it since maybe you can get a static site with a JSON shipped to the client and usually achieve similar results.

But, consider that by buying the cloud service you get: - database - probably a server with their hosted thingy (maybe a node.js server) - maybe some monitoring microservices as well

The question is then, - Does the time of setting the stuff up yourself, and the probable issues that come with it -- are they worth the marginal 15 dollars? This questions gets you the answer.

(Not to mention that some images of supposedly OSS microservices usually are different that their cloud service.)

Thanks for your feedback!