Stormkit
Next-gen web application hosting
Hey IndieHackers! I’m the founder of Stormkit, and I’m thrilled to share some major product updates we’ve rolled out over the past few years. As we’ve leaned into self-hosting, Stormkit has become a powerful platform for developers who crave control and flexibility. These changes have not only strengthened Stormkit for indie devs seeking freedom and reliability, but also caught the eye of larger enterprises integrating our platform.
During this time, one of our major additions has been the privacy-friendly server-side analytics, giving you insights into your app’s performance without compromising user trust—perfect for self-hosted setups. We also introduced persistent file storage (Volumes), making it easy to manage data reliably in your infrastructure. To ensure rock-solid deployments, we added post-deployment status checks, letting you run end-to-end tests before pushing to production, so you can deploy with confidence.
We’ve taken snippet injections to the next level, by introducing path and domain levels rules, a powerful feature for environments with multiple domains. Supporting multiple domains per environment gives you flexibility to manage complex projects under one roof. By introducing self-hosting, we’ve empowered developers to own their infrastructure fully, and adding support for more runtimes like Golang ensures Stormkit fits into diverse tech stacks.
These updates are all about making Stormkit the go-to choice for self-hosted developers. We’re excited to keep building tools that give you freedom and reliability. What features would you love to see next? Drop a comment—I’d love to hear your thoughts!
You can now write Typescript/Javascript APIs and deploy it together with your frontend application.
This gives plenty of flexibility to developers as there is no more need to think about infrastructure for backend services. Simply create an /api folder and place your endpoint handlers in there. We do support a file system routing, therefore you don't have to think about routing neither.
Send emails, insert data into database, validate inputs and many other use cases can now be handled using the /api folder.
Read more here: https://www.stormkit.io/docs/features/writing-api
We are humbled to announce that we have sponsored https://vuejsforge.com/. The online workshop helped thousands of developers to learn Vue.js and Nuxt.js by building a Trello clone in two days and deploy the application to Stormkit. It was an honor to be present as a speaker among great minds from the sector 🙏🏻
I'm so happy to announce that I have a technical co-founder on board since September, 2021.
In the last 6 months we've been focusing on improving the underlying infrastructure to be able to scale up without problems. Therefore, the communication side of the product was a bit left behind.
Now it's time to catch up and scale up!
I'm super happy to share you with you guys this fantastic news: We introduced the payment system a few days ago, and we just got our first paying customer, who bought an enterprise package at $99.90 per month. And the best part is that this customer has been using the tool since May, 2019 which means we're really solving a problem for them 🙌🏻
We reached over 600 apps deployed in the last 3 months. These apps deployed 2500 totally, with more than 250k files being uploaded to our CDN. Pretty amazing numbers!
We did some LinkedIn marketing to reach out developers. The conversion rate was very high. 40% of the people visiting our website signed up to try the app. Out of these people, 70% deployed at least one app.
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Good job! Would be curious to hear more about how you did LinkedIn marketing. Was that from direct messaging? Or content marketing?
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It was thru direct messaging :) At some point some users posted projects on platforms like freelancer.com, with mentions to Stormkit, that's also another way which we acquired new users.
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Today is a great day! We've been using Stormkit ourselves to host Stormkit and it's app, and our personal websites, but it's the first time when a user deployed an app and started to work on that using Stormkit. We received very valuable feedback and great appreciation. Ah and also, happy father's day 🙆♂️🎁🎉
On May 21st, 2019, we pitched Stormkit at WebZueri, a local meetup organised in Zurich, Switzerland. This was the first time we showed Stormkit publicly. We got very valuable feedback and two potential users. That was the first time we were in front of a public :) With this, we officially launched our MVP. All we have to do is now find new users :)
Now that I look back, it's been almost 9 months that I was working on this actively as a side project. I also have a family, and a full time job. As realising your dreams is a long-breathed process, it's very important to keep the balance, otherwise burning out will be unavoidable.
Having limited resources mean that you have to allocate your time as efficient as possible. As a developer, we tend to have that instinct which forces us to build unnecessary features and over-complicate the software. We like doing this. I also like it :) But, this time, I've tried to avoid it. I believe we were very good at prioritising the tasks and working on them efficiently. We always postponed tomorrow's problems to tomorrow and focused only on today's problems. Obviously, when doing this, you have to keep in mind scalability as you don't want to come back and change the behaviour of a software frequently.
Stormkit is a very complex tool behind the scenes. We make our lives more complex by trying to ease other developers lives, by shifting the complexity from their side to our side. Therefore, planning, allocation of resources and being determined were the key factors for me to come up with the MVP.
After having completed the PoC, I showed it to one of my colleague , who really loved the idea and told me that he'd like to contribute. As he is a frontend developer, he started to develop the frontend for Stormkit, and soon I joined when the backend was ready.
It was 2017 November and I was responsible for implementing server side rendering at tutti.ch. It was a blackbox for us, so I thought it would be cool to have a service which helps with server side rendering. That's how it all started. I worked on the idea for about a month, but then abandoned as it seemed very complex. 6 months forward, and all of a sudden I thought of a way to implement this. It took me 5 months to have a PoC, and I was finally able to come up with a minimal working version on November 2018.
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