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9 Comments

Estimating Hosting Costs

Hi Everyone, I am building some community software for an audience I've been nurturing through an email newsletter. I'm trying to estimate some costs and am wondering what something like Indie Hackers or a pre-AngelList Product Hunt might cost to host from month to month as a benchmark. In the first year I anticipate about 10,000 DAU. Any advice or tools out there to help with this?

#tech-questions

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    Echoing what @tonywang said, 10,000 DAU is not a big number compared to how powerful computers are today. My AWS t2.micro server could probably handle that as-is, and costs $10/month. The database behind it would be a little more expensive, depending on how much data you're generating--but probably not more than $100/month if you keep things lean.

    That being said you can spend WAY more than this quite easily if you build a fat stack with the latest hip NodeJS things etc.

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      Thanks for this, Alex. That is definitely in the ballpark of “affordable” right now. I’m not much of a developer, more of a creative and strategist, building my MVP on Bubble. It’s on Google Cloud and I’m not confident that it offers too much flexibility from a stack perspective. That said, just a baseline of $10/month and not $250/month helps me with some basic estimating as I lay out the roadmap. I appreciate it!

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    It completely depends on what and how you build. On Digital Ocean or Linode with performant tech choices $5-$10/month can do it. On Heroku with a scripting language and various add-ons you might spend $1000/month.

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    Let me know when you are ready to move from Bubble to your custom solution! :)

    if it's highly cachable (static) content, even 100k DAU would feel like 100 users to your app server btw. your server wouldn't even know about the requests since CDN would handle it.

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      I appreciate it @imeralpb! I'm pretty proficient at business planning around staff and other resources, but I've always had partners in this space. I appreciate the outreach and the offer; and of course the peace of mind that this probably won't get wildly expensive too fast.

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    Hi Justin

    That depends on what kinds of stacks are you planing for your project. There are lots of choices like firebase providing database, netlify providing static content. Also, AWS has a free tier for everyone. 10000 DAU is not a big number actually.

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      Very helpful. I am building a MVP on Bubble, which is basically a No-Code JS platform for non-developers like myself, and everything lives on the Google Cloud Platform. All of this could be short term, depending on when I see traction and can afford more full time development resource with strong dev-ops experience.

      Based on that info does anything change? I really appreciate the feedback .

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        You made the right choice. Bubble is good enough for building a mvp in a short time with little money. Looking forward to your product taking off. Anyquestions related dev-ops , welcome to contact me.

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