You don’t need AWS, K8s or magic spells to build a SaaS

Here’s how I built mine – fast, global and GDPR-compliant – without touching the cloud giants

When I started building Nureti (time tracking for freelancers and small teams), I kept running into posts that made it sound like you had to be an AWS-certified guru, spin up a Kubernetes cluster, or master Terraform just to launch something real.

But here’s the truth:
You don’t need all that to build a fast, scalable, EU-compliant SaaS.
You just need some decent servers, a clear idea, and the willingness to keep things simple.

I’ve launched two live SaaS products (Nureti and ftpGrid) running globally. They score 99 on Google Pagespeed (even mobile), handle real traffic, and are fully under my control – and I didn’t use AWS, Vercel, Render, or Fly.io.

Instead?
I went old-school:
• Self-hosted servers in Hetzner’s colocation (cheap + EU-based)
• Bunny for CDN and DDoS protection
• Docker + Portainer for deployment
• Go + React + PostgreSQL
• Even plain PHP for the landing page (because SEO matters, and I got tired of fighting crawlers over JS rendering…)

I wrote a full behind-the-scenes post about the tech stack, why I made those choices, and how the setup has scaled from MVP to paying users — without me ever needing to touch a hyperscaler dashboard.

Read the full post at https://nureti.com/blog/saas-tech-stack-and-infrastructure/

(Hopefully it’s helpful if you’re building something yourself and want to keep it lean!)

Would love to hear from others who took the “boring tech” path too – what’s your stack?