The most expensive part of the MVP was the domain name

The MVP for RestEz came together super quick, like, within 2 weeks of working on it for 3-4 hours each evening. But then I faced the problem I'm sure we all face, how do I host the MVP and how much will it cost?

With this being a Next.js app with Postgres implementation I knew that a good starting point was Vercel. However, I wasn't sure if I was going to fall within the limits each month, after all having an MVP that you can't even use isn't exactly a great start.

I spent a couple of days thinking about various different options, maybe I could use Amazon Amplify or an AWS free tier? What about the database? Where will I host that?

In the end I took a bit of a reality check and realized that with the MVP being mostly private it was highly unlikely I was going to reach the limits Vercel have on the free tier so that was that issue sorted, Vercel for hosting it is.

What about the Postgres database though? I already had a free one from Vercel that I needed so I couldn't just ditch that. After countless searches on Google I finally came across https://supabase.com thanks to a reddit post.

Again, they had a free tier available and with the clarity that I most likely wouldn't hit limits I just created a free tier account and tied it into the project on Vercel with minimal effort.

There we go, everything hosted for free, and I can figure out the rest later once I've actually got traction on the MVP. Now I can start collecting user feedback without burning a hole in my bank account!

What about the domain name? $25 USD, funded by a ko-fi for an open-source project that I own.

Now we just need to find that 1st, 10th, and 100th user to get some feedback and steer the project in the right direction.