You can build something for less than the price of a Netflix subscription
Building software in 2020 is really, really cheap. You can put together a full blown product, and start charging money for as little as $15 dollars a month, and in as little time as a few weeks to a few months. If price is the one thing holding you back from committing to building something, then you should stop worrying and get started now.
I’ve been building imprint.to, a blogging platform that combines the audience and simplicity of Medium with the control of Wordpress. To my surprise, it's actually been a lot cheaper than expected building this out.
My total monthly cost? $15 per month. That’s pretty good considering the fact that Imprint is a relatively content heavy application. Here’s a breakdown of all the services I’m using to build Imprint, along with their costs. Hopefully you can use some of the tools in this stack too!
- Frontend hosting: I’m running a Next.js app on a Heroku hobby dyno. $7/mo
- Backend hosting: I’m hosting my API and reverse proxy on a DigitalOcean droplet running Dokku. $5/mo
- Domain: I’m paying for a .to, which is a bit pricier at $40/yr, or $3.33/mo. If you get a more standard .com, .net, or .co, it’d boil down to $1/mo.
- Transactional email: Mailgun for sending and receiving emails from the imprint.to domain. Free for first 5,000 emails
- File storage: AWS S3 stores all images, videos, assets. Free for first 5GB.
- CDN and image transformations: AWS Cloudfront provides the CDN for all my S3 images. Also provides on the fly image transformations. Free for 50GB of data transfers
- Database: MongoDB Atlas has been super reliable, and I’ve had no problems hosting my MongoDB/NoSQL database here. Free up to 2GB storage
- Error Logging: Sentry. Free for 5k errors
- Search infrastructure: Algolia saves so much time in both building a UI for a search bar and for the underlying search functionality. Free for up to 50k operations and 10k records per month
- Analytics: Google Analytics is informative, and totally free.
And this should all scale up, at a similar price, for AT LEAST the first 5,000 active users.
BONUS: A couple ways to get platform credits and save a hefty amount of money.
- AWS Activate. Could net you a couple thousand in AWS credits to get started. https://aws.amazon.com/activate/
- DigitalOcean Hatch. Apply to their program and get started with a ton of DigitalOcean credits.
https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/ - YC Startup School. They’ve partnered with dozens of companies to provide amazing deals to all program participants. The program is free, and the curriculum is great.
- Github Education. If you’re a student, the Github Education Pack has countless deals for almost all of the services I’ve mentioned above. Take advantage of this if you can! https://education.github.com/pack
Original post: https://roland.imprint.to/post/5ebf7eb6a8e3ca00c2500ff8
I totally agree with this. My stack right now looks like this:
So that's $21.60 per month for me.
Right now my focus is keeping things lean while I'm building out the MVP. Azure can get pretty expensive but I'm already familiar with it due to previous experience. Once I've got some users I'll keep an eye on things and scale up as needed.
I'll also need email sending from the app soon. I've used SendGrid before but in my experience emails can get spam blocked if you don't use one of the the dedicate IP plans. Mailgun looks like a better option for this right now.
Anyway, I just wanted to show that it's possible to be frugal with a totally different stack. I'd love to see what others are doing :)
Thanks for sharing! Love learning about others stacks and continuing to see how much more accessible tech entrepreneurship has gotten.
Thanks for writing this out! I'm definitely saving it for later, a lot of information in this post.