Don't need the standby server, just use automated backups.

You also don't need the linode running nginx, with so few users put it on one server.

Finally wordpress should be $5/month or less.

Right there you could drop at least $15 / month.

$15 / month.

Kind of not even worth thinking about when you're a developer and should be internally billing yourself for $100/hour+.

Fair, what I decribed should reduce overhead as well (less nodes = less complexity typically).

Also when you're starting something you can't bill yourself anything mentally. Else you'd go out and be billing someone else, you'd likely make more money. In part cutting costs is important because it's actual savings, i.e. imagning billing yourself doesn't produce real money.

Hey, my day job doesn't pay nearly that much :)

Consolidate that all down to a single server and save your configurations in case you ever do get customers. There’s no need to be wasting $120/month when you literally have no customers at this point.

I'd disagree. Optimizing infrastructure costs is the last thing you should be worried about at the start. Your time is far, far more valuable. If it works, leave it alone and spend your time on product/sales/marketing.

- Infrastructure size correlates with labor required to keep everything running. It's not a perfect correlation, but keeping things small at the beginning usually saves a lot of time.

- Maintenance costs will be a limitation on how many different experiments you can keep running at the same time. If you consolidate everything on the same machine, and still has 98% of the machine for the next experiment, you will keep your first one running even if it has low profitability. If you need $120/month just to keep it running, you will be tempted to close it down after any new idea appear.

- You are assuming that the OP lives in a developed country and has a well paying job there. You are also assuming he has no risk of being unemployed for a couple of months.

- All that is probably dwarfed by taking a couple of hours a day for reading HN. So I should go back to my project and stop thinking about unasked advice :)

I use this app myself. Worst case, if it fails as a business I open source it and continue to use it myself (after consolidating onto a single host just for myself).

And I'm in the US and not going to run out of money assuming I can keep my day job :)

He has 5 trial signups after 6 weeks. Let’s be realistic here. His time is literally valueless because he hasn’t made a single sale.

Better to save money and expand if and when a paying customer shows up.

$120/month is a drop in the bucket. You need to look at the opportunity cost. His time is worth over $100/hour and better spent on other things (features, marketing, whatever..)

If he gets a ton of customers, he'll need to expand anyway and will waste even more time setting things back up.

Well, you know, I'd like to think my problem is sales/marketing and not product.

Maybe you know it, but reading your comments it looks like you are treating sales/marketing as an afterthought.

For running a successful business, I think you should try to always have the others in mind when you work on one, because that’s how you can find product/market fit (otherwise it’s mostly luck, and/or you had perfect hindsight of your market).

The value of his time is that he can use it to figure out what customers will actually pay for.

You could containerize all of these services and run them on the same machine.

I'd advise against single machine container deployment. You'll hit big problems the day you need to horizontally scale.

If you're going to dockerize, at least spread things over a two node swarm so you find these issues early.