I agree.

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.

Not a 1Password fan, but if your business hinges on 3$/month you probably shouldn't do business.

Looks to me like the 1P biz rate is $7.99 per chair per month, so once you hire employee number 100, you're spending $9600/yr. That shouldn't put you out of business, but still could be spent elsewhere?

Does nobody here see the irony in bending over backwards to avoid spending money on software products when the entire purpose of your business is to sell a software product?

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.

I generally agree, but I'd say it depends. I'm not too surprised that software developers are less likely to spend money on software - they do have another option non-programmers don't have. I'd also not be shocked to hear that trained accountants starting a company are less likely to hire accounting firms than non-accountants.

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.

Yes, but shouldn't I be making more even money by using these services to optimize those other things? If, say, Calendly helps me get booked for appointments, appointments that wouldn't have happened without that app, then isn't that spending money to make money?

If you think so, it's probably true. That's why I can't really disagree with parent :D

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 think it’s just because it’s described as “frugal”.

I take frugal to mean being smart or conservative with spending. However, optimizing to the extent some people are talking about here would redefine the term to mean "irrational" for me.

The Einstein quote is as applicable as ever: "Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler."

That's just being nice. We developers are a right bunch of cheap bastards. At least I am. I'm working on it, but it's just so ingrained and pervasive, it's weird. I've been trying to figure out where it comes from for a while now, and how to get people to work past it, with little success.

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.

Is it bending backwards though? The problem is that saas solutions scale in cost as well, so when you grow you pay more. For a small startup, there is always a cut off where the price of the saas service(s) explode well over the utility but you are hooked and you can afford it now. But should you? Personally I enjoy profits and more profits are better. I cannot accept using tools that I don’t really need, but, at success time, I cannot really get rid off anymore easily. And then suddenly that $10/mo is $23k/mo and I knew that when I integrated it in the first place, but thought it will save me 2 hours per year. And the new price utility is not suddenly saving me 100 or more hours a year; more like 4 hours.

That doesn't apply when the cost is static (adhering to the above advice of dumping 1P).

I don’t understand what you mean by static in this context. 1Password costs more when you have more employees.

If you have employees, you’re paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for them. Paying an extra $10/m to save 2 hours of their time is still a profitable trade.

Two things: the first is that it's easier to estimate costs with services like 1P due to it being mostly static, unlike other services where costs are quite dynamic ranging from different factors like usage and hours spent. The second is that once you reach that scale (more than 10 members), your costs are so large on personnel alone that $10/person is an absurdity to be frugal about when it can save you time.

I don’t doubt it’s possible, but I would love an example of a Saas product that successfully scales pricing from $10/m to $23,000/m on customer segments that aren’t enterprise-scale and has the kind of lock-in you describe.

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.

It depends a lot on your time and experience... Also, what you want to know. There's no guarantees at all with a SaaS startup, and if you can increase your knowledge base at a minimal time sink it may be worth it. I have a dozen things I tinker with and no expectations, so I treat it more as a hobby.

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.

The issue has less to do with not spending on software when your starting a software startup that it does the use of the term Frugal.

That implies bare minimum spend not splurge-in-just-a-few-areas cost to time savings benefit analysis.

> Does nobody here see the irony in bending over backwards to avoid spending money on software products when the entire purpose of your business is to sell a software product?

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 others have addressed your comment well, but I'll add my 2c:

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.

Pay more, no matter how unreasonable it is because you can afford it. You’re living in the US bubble, where VC funded startups feed each other in often unsustainable ways. People were taught this argument to keep the wheel spinning.

The right way to build a startup is: offload your infra, self host everything you can while balancing the maintenance effort/cost.

I used to be CTO of an Uber Eats style service that ran on hosting costs of about £100pm. Thousands of orders every few days, real time driver tracking, self hosted invoice generation, the works. Hetzner servers, Docker Swarm and Cloudflare for the tech.

> Hetzner servers

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.

I did that once and the data center burned down. Sure I could have the service spread over several centers and build distributed backups etc.

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.

To be fair, Datacenter burning down is pretty much on the bad luck side of risk management. It's in the same category as your distribution center being hit by an earthquake... I'd guess it wouldn't happen again, but who knows...

A Google Cloud region in France was also unavailable for months (or still is?) due to flooding/electricity. But no one is talking about it.

Didn't that happen from someone leaving a sink on or something, causing flooding and then the UPS batteries to short and explode?

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.

> As long as you're willing to roll your own infrastructure

Uh huh. This is why DevOps/SRE roles pay more than development roles.

“Step 2: draw the rest of the owl”

They do? That's interesting news!

Also more open positions, at least in some market.

It pays more because the on-call/pager requirements can be absolutely soul-crushing.

If you have a terrible manager, team, and product/platform. The reality is that most outages are caused by 9-5 changes made by humans.

If you know what you're doing it's easy enough to roll out a multi-region distributed system with HA and backups on a pretty modest (<100pcm) budget that can handle competitive QPS.

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.

What is HA ?

Guessing "high availability"

It's a pretty common abbreviation of high availability on this context, with a heavy implication on active-passive redundancy (although the GP looks like an exception here). It's more used than the full wording, and part of the name of some important tools.

So, yeah, it's good that you asked, because it's not as widely known as the people that use it think it is.

* * *

Another reason is that if you look for an investor, one of the first things they ask is how / where you host it. If it is anything remotely DIY you'll be turned down.

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.

Labor vs. commodity. Need an expert key-man to roll your own AWS. A few thousand bucks a month for the automatic one. Penny wise pound foolish etc.

> If it is anything remotely DIY you'll be turned down.

Why is that?

I'm sure you can guess - pure risk aversion. Your business idea is risky enough, and they would need engineers to assess your (possibly ever-changing) DIY stack.

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.

> some will learn, but most will fall for the cloud marketing depts and become infra renters for life

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.

I would also like to hear some recommendations as I've been considering making a similar switch.

I'm no expert but hopefully I can still point you toward the happy path: start very small and increase distributed complexity at your own pace until you can fully appreciate the entire end-to-end system and all the processes involved. The book: DDIA is a well-known 101, if a little primitive, and has references you can dig into as well.

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.

For your basic needs you'd need:

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.

I'm working on a middle-tier solution for this gap -- I call it Nimbus, but basically the idea is to provide managed services at low cost cloud prices.

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.

[1]: https://nimbusws.com/managed/umami/

do you anticipate that hosted umami will have features unavailable in the open source version?

Yeah, but all improvements will likely be upstreamed/made open source (their license isn't AGPL or anything but just makes sense to me since it's MIT).

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).

Hetzner is great and I love it and use it for all my dev needs. But there availability is in limited zones and for production I do suffer from the latency. Haven't found any other provider which costs anywhere near the same(every comparable server is at least 2x the cost). I use their AX41-NVME. Any suggestions of an alternate?

Maybe OVH or Scaleway?

Both of them are french companies and from my experience with them if you need support is a hit or miss.

I've been pretty happy with my OVH server, but agreed on support... had better luck with chatgpt and a lot of additional reading getting my CIDR block of addresses configured under ProxMox (which made me far less worried about ChatGPT taking my job any time soon).

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.

Vultr has some very cheap offerings and maybe worth a look. I can't speak to their reliability or service, but they have DCs everywhere even in South America and Africa where there are few cloud options outside of AWS. They're more expensive than Hetzner, maybe even a little over your 2x range depending on your load, but if latency is your issue they probably got you covered.

You'd be amazed how much you can get out of one of the Hetzner $3/mo ARM servers with the right code.

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...

Those ARM boxes are incredible for the price, I'm using them to document a hobby K8S cluster because the overall cost is low enough that it won't price a hobbyist out.

You get a lot of bang for your buck out of them.

Which k8s are you using and how are you managing it?

Talos Linux is great.

k3s, and nothing fancy except using a splash of helm to set some things up. The cluster has an auto-updater for unattended upgrades.

Similarly, but on the opposite spectrum, I also wonder how far you can go on vertical scaling nowadays. For 200 EUR/month on Hetzner you get a dedicated 80-core ARM CPU, 128GB ECC RAM, 2TB SSD...using a good performance multi-threaded language, what _can't_ you run on that? It's ridiculous value.

> what _can't_ you run on that? It's ridiculous value.

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].

---

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.

What's the best way to build and run a containerized PaaS on Hetzner?

CapRover / Dokku.

Battle of the SaaSes! The challenge: Can you build a profitable SaaS without giving money to other SaaSes!

People used to make websites by uploading some php or perl scripts to a shared server (or just buying a domain and pointing it at their home ip). In that context, I can't imagine someone writing an article like this.

I think it's kind of sad and insane that people seem to have forgotten (or came into the industry too late to know) that it's possible to build fun and useful things that way.

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.

The "shared server" concept is funny because as much as it seems old fashioned, it embodies the spirit of all the modern things:

* 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.

Instead of Intercom I can recommend crisp.chat which has a free tier if you can live with only 2 seats.

tawk.to

How does Ubersuggest compare to Ahrefs?

I was wondering the same.

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).

[0] https://neilpatel.com/blog/ubersuggest-vs-ahrefs/

Ah, a meticulous financial architect you are! Your cost-cutting calculus is impressive, a symphony of substitutions and savings. However, I must admit, the delicate dance between frugality and convenience often finds us pirouetting on the fine line between necessity and luxury. After all, who can resist the siren call of efficiency, even if it comes with a price tag?

While your fiscal finesse is commendable, remember that sometimes, spending is an investment in time and sanity – the most precious currencies of all.

Or use managed chatwoot instance for $10/month, so you don't have the devops burden https://elest.io/open-source/chatwoot

Exactly!

3.375$ a year: call it frugal...

There are a lot of use cases for which you can’t actually save by kicking out Ahrefs. Of all the tools here it is the hardest one to replicate. I agree w the rest - but in many situations Ahrefs is not replaceable.

What does it provide that is so special?

Its provides detailed analytics on the popularity of different websites and the keywords that people search for; it goes really, really deep on this, much deeper than you can go through manual google searches and various scripts. You can easily recreate Vercel on your own if you're willing to forgo some convenience, for example; there's no equivalent to that for Ahrefs - you can't realistically 'roll your own' or code your own Ahrefs. The web largely works on an advertising model, and Ahrefs is what tells you what has value for advertising purposes and what people will visit, or are visiting now. If you're doing something simple, it may not matter. If you're not, Ahrefs is indispensable.

I'm not sure I buy that. Surely ahrefs is depending on the data that Google provides and if that is the case, there can be a competitor.

Agreed- I'd be interested if someone could figure out how to do this on $0 for some period of time on sign up credits and free tiers