How much does it cost to run your side project?
Interested to see what the infrastructure cost developers are paying monthly to run their side project/business?
- Cloud provider(s)
- Project link
- Monthly cost
I want to see if I can help people reduce costs (if needed) and increase scalability. I know there are a lot of variables that go into cost but wanted to start with the above.
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Almost nothing, I run $150/month worth of servers for free. I got $5000 worth of credits for AWS for $49 from https://appsumo.com/startups/. I wrote down the full story here: https://jasminek.net/blog/post/free-servers/
That's an amazing deal. Your blog is pretty helpful. I wanted to create similar resources that help people keep costs low, not just from credits, but from overall project architecture (mainly serverless). What AWS resources go into your $150/month?
It's just one server, I need to have a lot of memory and CPU power for my product. There is also a load balancer in front of it to get https. I run my webapp on GCP AppEngine - one instance is free forever and that's enough for now.
That's not bad at all! Some applications just need the heavy CPU power.
I've been running Subsail now for four years. Currently the costs are:
$60/month Webfaction server
$5/month Google Suite (1 user)
$?? Paddle payment processing fees (I never see the fees, just my total profit)
Free Mailgun
Free Bugsnag
$14/month Fathom (cost is shared between 6 projects)
$25/month Help Scout
(Currently monthly revenue is above $2,000)
I don't have enough to contribute here as I'm still only a couple of days into dev, but I'm keen to see everyone else's setup so I guess I should submit my own:
Have you considered using Zoho business mail client for free Vs paying for G-suite?
Hadn't thought of that, will check it out! Thanks!
On Heroku, you don't have a database?
Yep, Postgres - first 10k rows are free on Hobby Plan
I tend to consume 10k so quickly :(
I’m at around $11/month for divjoy.com on ZEIT. Hard to beat that :)
Which database service do you use?
Firestore free tier
how much traffic do you see? I like zeit for the simplicity, but I have no idea if they are economical in their pricing.
About 60k visitors a month. I should mention that the majority of traffic hits static pages served from their CDN. Nice thing about using Next.js + ZEIT is you can serve static or server-rendered on a per-page basis.
That setup and cost is hard to beat and is similar to what I lean towards as well (but with AWS). I want more people to be aware of this to reduce overhead but I understand it can't work for all use cases. Great site btw!
Thanks! Yeah serverless is wonderful if you can make it work for your app.
can you elaborate on that? I'm playing around with something similar with nuxt and cloudfront/s3.
do you have some pointers/ resources? is that a ZEIT feature?
It's worth going through this tutorial if you're interested in Next.js and deploying it to ZEIT: https://nextjs.org/learn/basics/create-nextjs-app.
Basically Next.js will export a static file or a lambda for each page depending on whether it has data dependencies and whether you'd like that data fetched at build-time or run-time.
ok thank you, so it is a next.js feature
would ssr balloon those numbers up much?
So ZEIT recently changed their pricing to totally free if you don't have team members on your account (https://zeit.co/pricing). I'm still on the pay-per-usage plan. So it might actually be totally free if I move over to that, which I was planning on doing soon. I'm sure they have some limit where they would ask you to move to a team/enterprise plan, but I expect I'm well under that.
Wow, thanks for the tip, I had no idea.
What are ZEIT advantages over netlify?
It's similar, although it works better with Next.js in my opinion, as it can make any page a serverless function rather than just API endpoints.
For consentry.org, our startup costs have been under $200 thus far:
+1 for Cloudflare Workers, such a great product and value.
Cool stack @justifyles where did you incorporate whats the process
Thanks, Yoofi! We’re a bit different as we are incorporated in the UK. We are also a non-profit, but in the UK the process is basically the same so that wasn’t a factor. Happy to refer you if you are UK based. If you’re in the US, Stripe Atlas is probably the easiest bet, but more $$
yeah ikr
Would love to know more about your CloudFlare workers setup!!
Hey iced! We use workers to make our entire stack serverless. Our product is a widget that is loaded on top of other people's pages, and we serve the JavaScript that loads it as a worker site, as well as the javascript itself. We also use a worker as a proxy for our analytics in the widget so we aren't loading bulky third party tools on someone else's site. Lastly, our marketing site uses Gatsby.js, and served as a worker static site. I can't recommend Gatsby, but the workers have been a dream. They're infinitely scalable, and CDN'd by default.
I don't think it gets much better than that!
I've been running my side-project Sheet.chat for 1 year at very little cost:
Are you satisfied with Dokku? I tried it at some point but it seems to defeat the purpose of not having to deal with technical problems.
Totally satisfied! It probably works for me since I already deployed and managed a service “from scratch”.
I keep telling everyone that OVH VPS is by far the most effective/reliable option in the market. I also use it.
Could you elaborate please how you use backblaze? Potentially interested. No minimum fee?
PD: I just saw we are "neighbours"
It's not a side-project though
What are you doing with that?
I'm building AlterEstate, It's a CRM for the real estate market segment that focuses on automating the sales process through a visual sales pipeline management methodology (alterestate.com.do)
Amigo, that is really amazing. I love the project and the design. What are you using for the backend? Are you having enough customers?
Thank you so much, I do what I can haha. Yes so far we have over 240+ active paying customers. For the backend we use Python with Django, and on the frontend we use Create-react-app for the dashboard and a single instance of NextJS that renders the client design based on the domain making the request for the websites of our client. (AlterEstate also features a fully custom website builder that enable our customers to have their own website featuring our property search engine, examples are mrhome.com.do / premium.com.do)
Amazing job. I wish you good luck, but don't think really need it.
Consider me a new fan ;)
Thanks man I really appreciate it! 💪🏼
I'm running coolLabs & all other applications with the following costs:
So ~20$ / month.
I use that one server for hosting:
So it's like a heroku-ish / netlify-ish service.
Using free tiers, you can do a lot for a very long time before your user base grows.
I created a list of services with great free tiers (not limited in time, ready for prod, etc):
https://github.com/255kb/stack-on-a-budget
This movement is called Free Tier Driven Development :D
Concerning my project (https://mockoon.com) I use the following services and pay nearly nothing (note: it's a desktop application so I don't have the same requirements):
Two services I use all the time for every project because it (nearly) reduces to zero the cost of hosting, whatever your traffic:
Also:
Cost : 0$ (for approx 5-6K downloads/month, 1500-2000 unique users/day)
I am not including the domain from Google Domains (12$) because you can't reduce this cost.
The github resource is great. Your setup is similar to mine (but AWS). Going serverless can save you long term costs even after some of these free tiers run out.
Charttt.com is running on
cloudflare workers - $5/month (great deal - you can do almost everything with this service)
namecheap domain - $8.88/year
Google functions - Didn't cross the free tier
Auth0 - Didn't cross their free tier
Paddle - 5% of transactions
I also run freesaas.monster completely for free (except the domain, ~$3/year) - you can use it to get list of services that offer free tier in order to start on a budget
BTW - this post is great!!
Agreed on Cloudflare workers! We're using them too and they're absolutely amazing.
I keep a track of Buttondown's monthly costs at costs.buttondown.email!
The TLDR: $869/month, with the majority coming from Mailgun (I send and validate a lot of emails), Heroku (I'm lazy with infra), and Stripe (which is a nice problem to have.)
You could probably cut down your Mailgun costs by half by moving to AWS SES but I am sure Mailgun is easier to work with and with better reporting.
Ah, yup — SES is on my roadmap but Mailgun has better analytics and deliverability so it's mostly as a failsafe.
These are the cost I pay for running https://www.code-inspector.com every month. Total is always less than $300.
AWS: $250
Gsuite: $12
Datadog: $20
What AWS resources go into your $250?
About that price/cost
Basically nothing so far, pretty great!
https://pointway.app
Costs for running ContentCory (contentcory.com)
Does Forge handle deployments too?
Yes, but if you want something more advanced, there's also envoyer.io
For my project remotists.substack.com, I've spent $0 till now. I only use GA apart from that.
Sendgrid $35/mo.
Firebase/Google cloud $0.04/mo.
Webflow $192/year.
Google domain $300/year (many domains registered for future projects lol)
For Yourganize I use Google Firebase - I don't have many users so I'm on the free tier, but this can scale if you need. The positive for me is the database, node functions, auth, SSL, hosting (and storage if you need it) is all in one place. The down side is being tied in to one product if it became too expensive. I figured this would be a nice problem to have though as it would mean a large number of users! For most projects that are MVPs or validating an idea this is great though. This means I've only spent however much it was to get the domain name, £20/year?
I also use the free tiers of Hubspot and Mailchimp.
Hey.
I run an online community.
employremotely.com
Hi,
I'm still at the beginning as I only have ~100 users.
The project is colofon.io and it's Angular for the front-end, net core for back-end and api and postgresql for DB.
So far I have OVH as main provider:
So: 9€ per month.
To scale, my next steps will probably to use a DBass for Postgresql and a static website host like Zeit for front-end.
Interesting topic! Guess my example is not so relevant since I don't have any users but here goes:
Google Cloud Platform: free for now due to no usage
Namecheap domain: $9 a year
G-Suite: $5 a month
SimpleAnalytics: $19 a month (planning to change to yearly for $9/month)
Namecheap for the domain: $15/year
AWS (S3, EC2, CloudFront ): $12/month (this month's forecast)
Monthly cost: $13.25
Project link: https://www.valist.dev
Expenses for https://hireremotely.co are about ~$10/month
It's pretty cheap :) I launched https://saasinspire.com/ yesterday and bought micro vps from local hosting provider for $3.99/month plus $9/year for domain.
heroku starter - so far $1.55
cloudflare, google analytics - free
domain - $12 once
page - jbtemplates.com
So far almost nothing, I'm thinking of buying fb adds
Cheapest Digital Ocean droplets or Netlify free tier here :).
$200 Heroku
$50 MediaTemple
My side project is my blog.
I've got 2 projects live running on heroku. It's costing me currently about 14 dollars a month. Not making any money yet. Hope to soon.
I'm running Imprint.to for pretty cheap! Here's a breakdown of my costs
$57/mo right now. It's all server/storage costs for us, but it'll be higher as we scale. No marketing cost yet, but that'll be the real $ :) https://addspotlight.com?spotlight=5e9e276e7375de00175c5958
I’m running StaticForms on an Azure - App Service, Functions, Storage and SQL. Cost is under £50 per month.
For https://www.colorsandfonts.com
-The domain renewal, 16$ more or less..
https://newsletterest.com is running on a cheap Azure VM (Still in free trial period)
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