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Advice a begginer Indie Hacker with no way to pay for infrastructure and services.

I've been coding for less than a year. Fully self-taught. I'm actually still in college, but studying something that has nothing to do with this world. I've only done some freelancing.

I find myself now almost ready to execute some ideas I have for indie projects, in terms of technical knowledge, but where I live there's basically no way to pay for hosting, domains, payment platforms, ads, etc.

Its not a lack of money issue, is about barely having ways to pay.

So, I'm thinking of at least launching the MVPs with free accounts everywhere, which means no analytics, poor support, and poor infrastructure overall.

My fear is that it won't allow me to accurately measure my progress, and it will add too many hurdles.

Any advice?

EDIT: I want to build full fleshed webapps, not just static webs, backend and everything, and that’s where it gets tricky.

on April 11, 2022
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    This is hard to answer without knowing what sort of projects you're looking to work on.

    But, from a basic architectural standpoint, with a static site, a serverless backend and a document DB for database storage, you can get a long way without paying a cent on at least AWS, most likely the other major cloud providers too.

    For analytics, if someone signs up for your product it's a good signal that they're willing to pay, otherwise I don't put too much store what analytics are saying, or put it behind cloudflare and they (and no doubt many others) have a free analytics product.

    1. 1

      Thanks for answering John. I’ve actually built a couple of serverless static webapps, but now I want to build something bigger. Something that involves a server, a DB, a payment method (I plan to use crypto but I want to have other options), and that is where I’m feeling anxious, trying to manage a more complex infrastructure without paid accounts.
      I’ll edit the post to be clearer in this regard.

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        Sorry, I'm definitely tired.

        What I actually meant instead of static site, was a Single Page App (React, Angular, Vue). This can be hosted pretty much for free on object storage (S3).

        So an example AWS stack could be:

        • Angular (hosted on S3)
        • Cloudfront (CDN)
        • API gateway
        • Node JS lambda functions
        • DynamoDB for database

        This can all be run serving probably millions of requests / month within AWS's permanent free tier.

        1. 2

          Oh nice, that’s what I was looking for. Thank you so much!