What's (low budget) project stack do you use?
I just started solo dev last year and have been trying to keep all early prototype projects low budget. I personally build in a serverless way on @AWS and pay only for what I use (<$1 per month). I'm curious—what do you all use for low-budget development? Maybe I can find even cheaper build stack from you guys lol :)
Replies
For low budget development? My laptop, period, free (kinda)
For low budget deployment, usually a VPS, somewhere between $4 and $10/month, so yours beats mine.
@appsforhumans Thanks for sharing :) $4-$10 is still good considering you have dedicated resources. Actually cheaper than AWS instance lol.
@brandon_chen10 I go with digital ocean and install my own database. Having it run forever is still way cheaper than paying for a managed database. And if I ever needed to scale in the future. But pretty much you can run everything on one server for very low cost and then switch to AWS later if you really need to scale.
I use DigitalOcean’s $5/month droplet and host my app there with a simple Node.js backend.
@samber_samsa Me too 😁
For front-end, I stick with React and Netlify for deployment. Both offer free plans that work well for prototypes.
Codefield Comunity
Coding I use the TALL stack $0.
I use digitalcoean droplet $5/month.
Laravel forge(you might say this is unnecessary but in my opinion for the ease of use for laravel related apps is definitely worth it, but that's my opinion) about $20/month.
Storage DigitalOcean spaces about $5/month I believe.
Domain I use GoDaddy, so probably $15-$20/year.
I think that about coveres it. Might not be the cheapest option but iny opinion is totally worth it for a solid web app.
@kristi_tanellari Thanks for sharing! Its always good to see the tech. that other people uses and to learn things never heard before.
I use Hetzner Cloud and have the freedom to install and configure it according to my needs.
PHP, Python, MySQL, or MongoDB - does not matter ;)
I use Firebase, which has a generous free tier my budget is less than $3 yet achieving production-grade performance, I switched from $5 droplets which are not scalable and require manual management, for highly performance-critical apps I use Google Cloud-run yet cost-effective because of generous free tier and pay as go modal
Purposeful Poop
For a WIP project I just run everything in an EC2 instance.
I have a few instances, but my main server (which is a micro) runs about 5 different apps (many of which are very light).
For an "im trying to make this real" project, I still use ec2 and just give the project its own server.
I know AWS is more expensive than DO and such, but their primitives are so ubiquitous, that having the skills is pretty valuable if you look for real jobs / and or just need to poke around at your real job. I sort of write it off as an investment into having relevant skills. Not to say regular sys-admining isn't useful, it deff is, I just personally have found the AWS flavor is helpful.
In terms of the project itself, they almost all start with sqlite, fast-api and templated HTML (the SFT stack).
then if it continues to be interesting, I sub out to psql, fast-api, react (the PFR stack). this migration is trivial because i have written very little code at this point and genAI is pretty good at turning things into react.
with SFH I can have something running within a few minutes, which is helpful to mock things up, and the "deploys" are just rsync ing to the server and running. I dont do any migrations at that phase, just delete the DB and restart lol.
once i get to PFR, I make dockerfiles, setup migrations, etc.
I did recently set up some lambda functions for someone and couldn't believe how cheap it was compared to ec2.
I never really thought about using it "for the backend" though (i just used it to run some job that happens once an hour). are there gotcha's with this? do they need some time to warm up or can you just literally treat them like endpoints that are available to be hit and return with low latency?