But I get it. If X tool saves time, why not pay for it? I wouldn't call that frugal though because you are still spending where you can save.
But I get it. If X tool saves time, why not pay for it? I wouldn't call that frugal though because you are still spending where you can save.
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 probably go into more detail on why Intercom's widget is so much better. If it's just animations and UX, then yeah go find some alternative or self host.
What's useful in the self-hosting space is finding either a tool to manage server provisioning & management (e.g. Ploi), or a hosting provider that makes it easy to install (e.g. DO marketplace). Then you're only spending a small fee on the management and only spending on hosting cost (which for a long time can be negligible).
Spending some time to DIY with reliable tools (automated where possible) is IMO still preferable to spending this much money if starting from scratch.
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 starting up.
I find these threads endlessly amusing considering that, for hundreds of years, starting a business involved massive investments in real estate, physical equipment, etc. We're living the dream, yet somehow quibbling over spending $10/month on a piece of software. If it saves you just 2 hours, per year, then it's worth it.
In the context of a business, nearly any piece of software is a trivial cost compared to hiring a human (or yourself) to do a task.
If there was a magic debugger that made debugging 100x easier and faster, but it wasn't free and open source, I'd still have a hard time using it even though it would save me a bunch of time, and easily pay for itself in time and frustration saved.
And most software I deal with isn't exactly free of opportunity cost - I dabbled a bit with accounting tools to the point of frustration and time sunk that I decided to roll my own (built around ledger, in case anyone cares) in about a day. Writing my own tool is sometimes faster for me than trying to figure out how to use one that's not designed around my specific needs.
Sure, 10$ doesn't seem like much, but all these little invoices can creep up to a non-trivial sum.
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, ...
I ask because I would like to quit my job and build a competitor ASAP.
Also, the problem isn’t the potential cost down the road. If you’re scaling on any Saas product to the $23k/m tier, then congrats, you’ve made it!
The problem is, there’s a 90%+ chance all your cost optimizing upfront was a giant waste of time, because a vast majority of startups don’t work out. And the ones that do often pivot.
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.
That implies bare minimum spend not splurge-in-just-a-few-areas cost to time savings benefit analysis.
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.
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.
The right way to build a startup is: offload your infra, self host everything you can while balancing the maintenance effort/cost.
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.
In the end self hosting and self managing is a money / time trade off, especially for a side gig I’d us SAS and managed solutions. The one thing one has to make sure off is to not get locked in with a particular provider, so knowing how to do everything yourself is a very valuable skill.
I was there when someone at AWS accidentally unplugged an entire region.
Shit happens, it doesn't matter where it's hosted. People act like the cloud is infallible or something. You're literally sending lightning bolts worth of electricity through bricks of metal. Anything can happen.
Uh huh. This is why DevOps/SRE roles pay more than development roles.
“Step 2: draw the rest of the owl”
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.
So, yeah, it's good that you asked, because it's not as widely known as the people that use it think it is.
It was actually painful to see start ups spending thousands a month on hosting, that could be easily achieved as you say under 100 pcm plus. They would have to get a contractor to set it up and for support, but it would have worked out much cheaper and they could have bumped the salaries of their workers.
Why is that?
You see the same thing in the corporate world for in-house stuff. Your manager (and your manager's manager) don't want to hear about in-house or self-hosted things that AWS can provide.
This is totally understandable. It's a repeat of the whole "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" mantra of computing's early decades.
It also totally sucks.
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.
Ideally, you also have some exposure to this at $job as simply building DIY infra horrors without seeing the real-world context, tradeoffs, etc. in which they typically operate will be misleading.
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.
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 tracking extensively on my own projects now, with Nimbus[1]. The dogfood tastes decent so far.
The first thing I want to do is add a backup mechanism that isn't just take a snapshot -- There are a bunch of similar tools to Umami and I don't think that any of them have a really good cross-project way of taking backups.
Feels like there should be a page view/analytics backup standard, so you can easy move from a tool like Plausible or Umami and try out a new one, like Fugu.
But outside of advanced functionality I think my platform is just a lot closer on cost. The instance costs don't go up per traffic served (especially since 99% of people won't need that) -- it's more like parts + maintenance (and since Umami is good software it doesn't need a TON of maintenance either, just regular patches and some monitoring/extremely light resilience engineering).
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.
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...
You get a lot of bang for your buck out of them.
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].
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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.
I built a forum/social site that way back in the day and it was active and profitable for 10+ years.
It also feels like the art of optimization has been lost.
For small and medium sites a lot of today's crazy build pipeline and distributed asset hosting complexity can be sidestepped if you just focus on optimization and making sure that cache expiration dates for your assets are set correctly.
On the server side, it is considered "normal" these days to have maybe 50+ database queries per request. People then reach for expensive and complex database solutions (clustering, etc) before doing simple app-layer optimizations like caching.
* Serverless - in that you don't need to do server admin
* Online IDE - CPanel lets you make changes online to your code
* Continuous Integration - When you save the file online it is in immediate production
* Branching - you can copy a folder from one subdomain folder to another - this effectively gives you a poor man's git and environments in one swoop!
It is like a REPL of web dev. Nothing can come close to it, because once you made your changes they are live, there is no infuriatingly slow publishing step.
Ubersuggest has a comparison page[0]. From my understanding it boils down to Ubersuggest being cheaper and most likely enough for what most users will need, but Ahrefs has a larger tool suite (and much higher cost).
3.375$ a year: call it frugal...