Thought about maybe running a Postgres VPS, but I've enjoyed using neon.tech more than I expected (esp. the GUI and branching). I guess the thing that has crept in: speed/ease is really beating out my ingrained cheapness as I've gotten older and have less time. A SaaS DB has sped things up. Still don't like the monthly bills & variability though.
Have you used SQLite with Litestream? That's the beauty of it. You can blow away the app and deploy it somewhere else, and Litestream will just pull down your data and continue along as if nothing happened.
At the top of this post, I show a demo of attaching Litestream to my app, and then blowing away my Heroku instance and redeploying a clean instance on Fly.io, and Litestream ports all the data along with the new deployment:
If anything, I'd probably end up looking at a dedicated PG VPS. I've started to get used to a few Postgres conveniences over SQLite, especially around datetimes, various extensions, and more sophisticated table alterations (without that infamous SQLite 12-step process), etc. So that's been an evolution, too, compared to my always-SQLite days.
> It’s a simple, open-source tool that replicates a SQLite database to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage.
That was a very long walk to get to that second quote. And it makes the first quote feel deceptive.
I'm not sure what you are hitting that would go past the capacity of a small vps.
Independent VPs for DB make sense, but if the requests are reasonably cached, you can get away with it (and beef up the backups) especially if it's something non-critical.
I'm heavily inspired by it and working on an app for book clubs to host "elections" to choose their next book to read using a variety of voting systems (ranked choice, approval, scored, first past the post, etc).
One thing I find interesting is the growth chart: It's linear. But given that the app clearly has some traction, and is viral in nature, how come it isn't exponential?
I suspect that the architecture can be improved to get the cost down.
One thing I’ve been interested in is the idea of decentralized handling for this. That is, the project is funded in and every month if its bills don’t get paid it dies. If it receives enough to go over it buys T-bonds for the appropriate duration and then burns them down over time.
Perhaps in the past it would have to be automated but I wonder if in the near future a limited AI agent could be the server and you leave him alone to do his thing.
One thing that drives me crazy is it works really poorly on slow mobile connections. I'd really love to try to add local first or offline first support but I know it would be a significant change. However, even just caching pages like the add expense page would be a nice improvement.
The web hosting costs basically nothing. Most of the cost comes from the database.
Modern computers are mind-bogglingly powerful. An old laptop off eBay can probably handle the load for business needs for all but the very largest corporations.
I was surprised by the cost of Vercel in that blog post too, which is why I dislike all kinds of serverless/lambda/managed services. For me, having a dozen people subscribing to $1-$2/month sponsorship on GitHub Sponsors is enough to cover all the costs. Even if no one donates, I’d still have no trouble keeping the project running on my own.
How many times per second is the DB actually accessed? As far as I can tell my the metrics, they're doing ~1.7 requests/minute, you'll have a hard time finding a DB that couldn't handle that.
In fact, I'd bet you'd be able to host that website (the database) in a text file on disk without any performance issues whatsoever.
You can read a little bit more about my analytics setup here:
https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...
Very possible.
OTOH If you want managed Postgres it seems like you always have to pay a fairy high minimum.
It does feel like the tech community as a whole has forgotten how simple and low resource usage hosting most things is, maybe due to the proliferation of stuff like AWS trying to convince us that we need all this crazy stuff to do it?
If banks would get their head out of their ass, this would be a native feature with ach/zelle/fednow as the backbone. Organizer creates group in bank app and can invite other users which may have different bank accounts. Payment requests satisfied through 1-click. No more manually checking if Cashapp/bank accounts/venmo have received payment then checking off the expense in third party app
I'm 99% sure I'm reading something wrong, as that's incredible expensive unless this is hosting LLM models or something similar, but it seems like it's a website for sharing expenses?
A more charitable reading is that they pick the technologies that the jobs they want are hiring for, even if they don’t make sense for this simple application.
I'm not sure, I'm also "new generation of devs" I suppose, cloud had just entered the beginning of the hype cycle when I started out professionally. Most companies/individuals at that point were pushing for "everything cloud" but after experiencing how expensive it really is, you start to look around for alternatives.
I feel like that's just trying to have a "engineering mindset" rather than what generation you belong to.
It's certainly possible to spin up your own db backup scripts, monitor that, make sure it gets offsite to an s3 bucket or something, set yourself a calendar reminder to test that all once a month, etc... but if I had to write out a list of things that I enjoy doing and a list of things that I don't, that work would feature heavily on the "yeah, but no" list.
I unfortunately sorta put myself in this category where my PaaS of choice is Firebase. For this cost-splitting app however, what would you personally recommend if not Vercel? Would you recommend something like a Digital Ocean Droplet or something else? What are the best alternatives in your opinion?
I was surprised how extremely easy it is to get set up with Coolify on a Hetzner VPS, which has preset install options for NextJS + Supabase + Posthog + many others. And I get the standard autodeploy on commit functionality. The open-source versions are missing some features, and I don't get the slick Vercel admin interface, but for a pet project it works great. I'm also by no means a sysadmin expert, but with ChatGPT it's pretty easy to figure things out now.
Even less when I pay for a dedicated machine running all of my hobby projects. Gratuitous Kamal 2 plug. Run your personal projects all on one machine.
First thing I thought while reading was Firebase - it's interesting how much it would cost there.
... Should be more than enough to handle 2 requests per minute, could probably handle 100x of that.
So it should be able to handle somewhere in the ballpark of 2,000,000x the required load, or maybe 100,000x without the application level optimization.
(TLS reduces this by a factor of ~10 if you're doing handshakes each time. Despite what blogs claim, as far as I can tell, if your CPU doesn't have QAT, TLS is very expensive)
Of course doing SSL on the server itself is more secure, but if that's a performance bottleneck the load balancer can be a cost effective compromise
> A short disclaimer: I don’t need donations to make Spliit work. I am lucky enough to have a full-time job that pays me enough to live comfortably and I am happy to give some of the money I earn to the community.
And this is why open source will finally die, because being comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger generations.
A better way to "give back to the community", instead of making open source software, would be to purchase software from other indie developers.
We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products).
> being comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger generations.
edit: remved anecdote
The cost of living will never rise so much that the upper 50% can't easily make enough money. (Otherwise what? The other 150 million people go homeless?)
And unless our industry sees a major shift, which I don't see happening, software engineers will continue being comfortably in the upper 50%.
That's a given. If you open source your code, other developers will steal it and sell your software. Just like billion dollar tech companies are the main benefiters of open source today, that some guy made for free. Excuse me, I meant for $42 in donations.
Work for free for huge companies so they can make billion dollar profits while at the same time demanding unionization. Refusing to sell your work to consumers who are willing to pay, yet happy to provide free tech support to free loaders who wouldn't give you a cent. What's the logic?
To clarify some confusion in this thread, it might be helpful to distinguish "open source" (the application) from "free" (this hosted instance of the application). Munging the two together might lead to some incorrect conclusions. Running a "free" application for others is going to have certain costs. The cost of running an "open source" application is going to depend entirely on the resources that application consumes, which, if run privately, might be a lot less.
