tangential question for the HN side-project crowd:
i have lots of ideas for fun little side projects that would never be revenue generating.
i'll go on a tear and start building it, but when it comes time to figure out how much it'd cost each month for domains/cloud services/etc I talk myself out of it. I'm not talking about big LLM bills here, just things like $25/month for the database, $10-50/year for a domain, etc.
I don't think it's just that I'm being cheap, it's that I don't like the idea of having to pay for something in perpetuity. Because that leads to me thinking about how long I plan to keep it active and when I'll sunset it. And once you start thinking about that before you've even launched, it's pretty easy to conclude it's not worth the time to build it given its limited shelf life. If I could just do a one-time upfront payment I'd probably go through with it.
The solutions to this are either buying a server and self-hosting (no thanks) OR making peace with having a recurring 'goofy computer stuff' monthly bill.
So... how much do yall spend each month on your side-projects? Having some numbers would help me contextualize and justify this
What's wrong with a single domain and a $5/m VPS that keeps both DB and application on it?
I ran a paid business app on a $5/m VPS. No complaints.
If your $5/m VPS cannot handle some load, then that's when you upgrade it. And, TBH, at the point that your $5/m VPS is at 80% load on a paid product, you're already getting a few thousands of dollars of revenue from it anyway.
if i were just using a dataset to store user settings, i could get by with something tiny.
but my problem is that my fun project ideas are usually some variant of "theres a huge dataset, lets build some fun dataviz on it". which is a problem because a) i need a big db to store that giant dataset and b) the db size doesn't scale with usage, so i can't just put it off until later
You can rent a dedicated server with 1tb disk space, and 12-16 full cores for <50 bucks per month. I'm confident you can host as many projects as you'd like on there for quite awhile.
Okay, just how much data are we talking?
$5/m droplet + $10/m storage gets you 100GB of storage that you can put a PostgreSQL (or other) DB onto.
The storage situation is not quite as expensive as it used to be.
https://www.digitalocean.com/products/block-storage
I have an old Mac mini in a closet that runs Ubuntu and serves as a Dokku [1] host. My side projects run for free and are accessible inside my network or if I'm on VPN. If the project gets enough love eventually it'll graduate to public hosting and the transition is easy because the app is already built with deployment in mind.
I have saved so much money over the years just not having to pay $20/mo * IDEA_QTY. The Mac mini doesn't take much power and is dead silent.
[1] https://dokku.com
I have had a single cheapest ec2 server at 5$ per month and hosted both db and server in it. Sqlite for db so easy to back up. It didn't contain any important data though.
I ran many projects in it
I found fly.io to be very generous and pretty easy to get started with. There's also free tiers from AWS, GCS, or maybe even Vercel depending on your needs. So get free hosting, build things out, they pay for a domain which seems to be the only thing you can't cheat or steal :)
Cloudflare can be free for a long time without much usage. Assuming serverless is enough.