> The enterprise mindset dictates that you need an out-of-process database server. But the truth is, a local SQLite file communicating over the C-interface or memory is orders of magnitude faster than making a TCP network hop to a remote Postgres server.<p>I don't want to diss SQLite because it is awesome and more than adequate for many/most web apps but you can connect to Postgres (or any DB really) on localhost over a Unix domain socket and avoid nearly all of the overhead.<p>It's not much harder to use than SQLite, you get all of the Postgres features, it's easier to run reports or whatever on the live db from a different box, and much easier if it comes time to setup a read replica, HA, or run the DB on a different box from the app.<p>I don't think running Postgres on the same box as your app is the same class of optimistic over provisioning as setting up a kubernetes cluster.
Sqlite smokes postgres on the same machine even with domain sockets [1]. This is before you get into using multiple sqlite database.<p>What features postgres offers over sqlite in the context of running on a single machine with a monolithic app? Application functions [2] means you can extend it however you need with the same language you use to build your application. It also has a much better backup and replication story thanks to litestream [3].<p>- [1] <a href="https://andersmurphy.com/2025/12/02/100000-tps-over-a-billion-rows-the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-sqlite.html" rel="nofollow">https://andersmurphy.com/2025/12/02/100000-tps-over-a-billio...</a><p>- [2] <a href="https://sqlite.org/appfunc.html" rel="nofollow">https://sqlite.org/appfunc.html</a><p>- [3] <a href="https://litestream.io/" rel="nofollow">https://litestream.io/</a><p>The main problem with sqlite is the defaults are not great and you should really use it with separate read and write connections where the application manages the write queue rather than letting sqlite handle it.
Thing is though - either of those options is still multiple orders of magnitude faster than running on a remote host. Either will work, either will scale way farther than you reasonably expect it to.
> Sqlite smokes postgres on the same machine even with domain sockets [1].<p>SQLite on the same machine is akin to calling fwrite. That's fine. This is also a system constraint as it forces a one-database-per-instance design, with no data shared across nodes. This is fine if you're putting together a site for your neighborhood's mom and pop shop, but once you need to handle a request baseline beyond a few hundreds TPS and you need to serve traffic beyond your local region then you have no alternative other than to have more than one instance of your service running in parallel. You can continue to shoehorn your one-database-per-service pattern onto the design, but you're now compelled to find "clever" strategies to sync state across nodes.<p>Those who know better to not do "clever" simply slap a Postgres node and call it a day.
> SQLite on the same machine is akin to calling fwrite.<p>Actually 35% faster than fwrite [1].<p>> This is also a system constraint as it forces a one-database-per-instance design<p>You can scale incredibly far on a single node and have much better up time than github or anthropic. At this rate maybe even AWS/cloudflare.<p>> you need to serve traffic beyond your local region<p>Postgres still has a single node that can write. So most of the time you end up region sharding anyway. Sharding SQLite is straight forward.<p>> This is fine if you're putting together a site for your neighborhood's mom and pop shop, but once you need to handle a request baseline beyond a few hundreds TPS<p>It's actually pretty good for running a real time multiplayer app with a billion datapoints on a 5$ VPS [2]. There's nothing clever going on here, all the state is on the server and the backend is fast.<p>> but you're now compelled to find "clever" strategies to sync state across nodes.<p>That's the neat part you don't. Because, for most things that are not uplink limited (being a CDN, Netflix, Dropbox) a single node is all you need.<p>- [1] <a href="https://sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html" rel="nofollow">https://sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html</a><p>- [2] <a href="https://checkboxes.andersmurphy.com" rel="nofollow">https://checkboxes.andersmurphy.com</a>
> You can scale incredibly far on a single node<p>Nonsense. You can't outrun physics. The latency across the Atlantic is already ~100ms, and from the US to Asia Pacific can be ~300ms. If you are interested in performance and you need to shave off ~200ms in latency, you deploy an instance closer to your users. It makes absolutely no sense to frame the rationale around performance if your systems architecture imposes a massive performance penalty in networking just to shave a couple of ms in roundtrips to a data store. Absurd.
How do you manage HA?
Backups, litestream gives you streaming replication to the second.<p>Deployment, caddy holds open incoming connections whilst your app drains the current request queue and restarts. This is all sub second and imperceptible. You can do fancier things than this with two version of the app running on the same box if that's your thing. In my case I can also hot patch the running app as it's the JVM.<p>Server hard drive failing etc you have a few options:<p>1. Spin up a new server/VPS and litestream the backup (the application automatically does this on start).<p>2. If your data is truly colossal have a warm backup VPS with a snapshot of the data so litestream has to stream less data.<p>Pretty easy to have 3 to 4 9s of availability this way (which is more than github, anthropic etc).
No offense, you wait. Like everyone's been doing for years in the internet <i>and still do</i><p>- When AWS/GCP goes down, how do <i>most</i> handle HA?<p>- When a database server goes down, how do <i>most</i> handle HA?<p>- When Cloudflare goes down, how do <i>most</i> handle HA?<p>The down time here is the server crashed, routing failed or some other issue with the host. You wait.<p>One may run pingdom or something to alert you.
> When AWS/GCP goes down, how do most handle HA?<p>This is a disingenuous scenario. SQLite doesn't buy you uptime if you deploy your app to AWS/GCP, and you can just as easily deploy a proper RDBMS such as postgres to a small provider/self-host.<p>Do you actually have any concrete scenario that supports your belief?
<a href="https://antonz.org/sqlite-is-not-a-toy-database/" rel="nofollow">https://antonz.org/sqlite-is-not-a-toy-database/</a> — 240K inserts per second on a single machine in 2021. The problem you describe is real, but the TPS ceiling is wrong by three orders of magnitude on modern hardware.
I wonder what percentage of services run on the Internet exceed a few hundred transactions per second.
I’ve seen multimillion dollar “enterprise” projects get no where close to that. Of course, they all run on scalable, cloud native infrastructure costing at least a few grand a month.
I think the better question to ask is what services peak at a few hundred transactions per second?
I mean, your "This is fine for" is almost literally the whole point of TFA, that you can go a long way, MRR-wise, with a simpler architecture.
FYI, the color gradient on your website is an easy tell that it was vibe coded: <a href="https://prg.sh/ramblings/Why-Your-AI-Keeps-Building-the-Same-Purple-Gradient-Website" rel="nofollow">https://prg.sh/ramblings/Why-Your-AI-Keeps-Building-the-Same...</a>
Looks like the overhead is not insignificant:<p><pre><code> Running 100,000 `SELECT 1` queries:
PostgreSQL (localhost): 2.77 seconds
SQLite (in-memory): 0.07 seconds
</code></pre>
(<a href="https://gist.github.com/leifkb/1ad16a741fd061216f074aedf1ecaf62" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/leifkb/1ad16a741fd061216f074aedf1eca...</a>)
I love them both too but that might not be the best metric unless you’re planning to run lots of little read queries. If you’re doing CRUD, simulating that workflow may favor Postgres given the transactional read/write work that needs to take place across multiple concurrent connections.
This is mostly about thread communication. With SQLite you can guarantee no context switching. Postgres running on the same box gets you close but not all the way. It's still in a different process.
Most important is that that local SQLite gets proper backups, so a restore goes without issues
Would be nice to see PGLite[1] compared too<p>1: <a href="https://pglite.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://pglite.dev/</a>
A total performance delta of <3s on ~300k transactions is indeed the definition of irrelevant.<p>Also:<p>> PostgreSQL (localhost): (.
.) SQLite (in-memory):<p>This is a rather silly example. What do you expect to happen to your data when your node restarts?<p>Your example makes as much sense as comparing Valkey with Postgres and proceed to proclaim that the performance difference is not insignificant.
Why are you comparing PostgreSQL to an in-memory SQLite instead of a file-based one? Wow, memory is faster than disk, who would have thought?
Because it doesn't make a difference, because `SELECT 1` doesn't need to touch the database:<p><pre><code> Running 100,000 `SELECT 1` queries:
PostgreSQL (localhost): 2.71 seconds
SQLite (in-memory): 0.07 seconds
SQLite (tempfile): 0.07 seconds
</code></pre>
(<a href="https://gist.github.com/leifkb/d8778422d450d9a3f103ed43258cc52c" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/leifkb/d8778422d450d9a3f103ed43258cc...</a>)
Why are you doing meaningless microbenchmarks?
> Because it doesn't make a difference, because `SELECT 1` doesn't need to touch the database:<p>I hope you understand that your claim boils down to stating that SQLite is faster at doing nothing at all, which is a silly case to make.
It is insignificant if you're doing 100k queries per day, and you gain a lot for your 3 extra seconds a day.
What a useful "my hello-world script is faster than your hello-world script" example.
I have used SQLite with extensions in extreme throughput scenarios. We’re talking running through it millions of documents per second in order to do disambiguation.
I won’t say this wouldn’t have been possible with a remote server, but it would have been a significant technical challenge.
Instead we packed up the database on S3, and each instance got a fresh copy and hammered away at the task. SQLite is the time tested alternative for when you need performance, not features
> It's not much harder to use than SQLite, you get all of the Postgres features, it's easier to run reports or whatever on the live db from a different box, and much easier if it comes time to setup a read replica, HA, or run the DB on a different box from the app.<p>Isn't this idea to spend a bit more effort and overhead to get YAGNI features exactly what TFA argues against?
I've been doing that for decades.. People seem to simply not know about unix architecture.<p>What I like about sqlite is that it's simply one file
I mean, you’re not wrong about the facts, but it’s also pretty trivial to migrate the data from SQLite into a separate Postgres server later, if it turns out you do need those features after all. But most of the time, you don’t.
Thats just swapping another enterprise focused concern into the mix. Your database connection latency is absolutely not a concerning part of your system.
Author's own 'auth' project works with sqlite and postgres.
IIRC TCP/IP through localhost actually benchmarked faster than Unix sockets because it was optimized harder. Might've been fixed now. Unix sockets gives you the advantage of authentication based on the user ID of who's connecting.<p>My experience with sqlite for server-based apps has been that as your app grows, you almost always eventually need something bigger than sqlite and need to migrate anyway. For a server-based app, where minimizing deployment complexity isn't an extremely important concern, and with mixed reads and writes, it's rarely a bad idea to use Postgres or MariaDB from the start. Yes there are niche scenarios where sqlite on the server might be better, but they're niche.
ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE NEWS
If this sounds like basic advice, consider there are a lot of people out there that believe they have to start with serverless, kubernetes, fleets of servers, planet-scale databases, multi-zone high-availability setups, and many other "best practices".<p>Saying "you can just run things on a cheap VPS" sounds amateurish: people are immediately out with "Yeah but scaling", "Yeah but high availability", "Yeah but backups", "Yeah but now you have to maintain it" arguments, that are basically regurgitated sales pitches for various cloud platforms. It's learned helplessness.
“Cloud-native natives” had so much free plans that had no need to understand what a basic app really needs.
And now big tech often doesn't even have the high availability to show for all that complexity.
The better availability and scalability of “the cloud” always relied on so many things being done and maintained just right by just the right people that I don’t think it’s ever been broadly true.<p>You get such a large performance malus and increase in complexity right from the start with The Cloud that it’ starts at a serious deficit, and only eventually <i>maybe</i> overcomes that to be overall beneficial with the right workload, people, and processes. Most companies are lacking minimum <i>two</i> of those to justify “the cloud”.<p>And that’s without even considering the cost.<p>What I think it actually is, is a way for companies that can’t competently (I mean at an organizational/managerial level) maintain and adequately make-available computing resources, to pay someone else to do it. They’re so bad at that, that they’re willing to pay large costs in money, performance, and maybe uptime to get it.
Apparently the phrase cargo cult software engineering is not common anymore. Explains these things perfectly.
I end up explaining this term to every junior developer that doesn't know it sooner or later, the same way I explain bike shedding to all PMs that don't know it... often sooner, rather than later.<p>It seems to really help if you can put a term to it.
Heh, I was gonna say cargo cult might mean something different in today’s programming landscape but then I thought about it for a second and it actually reinforces th meaning.
I don't know what to say. People keep saying these engineers exist and here I am not having seen a single, and I follow many indie hackers communities.
A devops coworker found my blog and asked me how I host it, is it Kubernetes. I told him it's a dedicated server and he seemed amazed. And this was just a blog. It's real
I've worked at a startup that could've trivially ran on a single VPS and kept things simple yet had a dedicated infra guy using a full k8s setup.
How else are you going to put k8s on your CV? :-P
hey - devs aren' the only ones who fall in the premature optimization trap! Everyone from the CTO envisioning the scale of their future startup down to the IT intern is influenced by this, plus it's in the best interest of a dedicated infra guy to have a lot of dedicated infra. If you don't manage people K8s can become your kingdom and the size a badge of importance.
Because I think precisely the indie hacker community is not as keen to default to the big-tech stacks, because those are neither indie, nor hack-y :)
> I use Linode or DigitalOcean. Pay no more than $5 to $10 a month. 1GB of RAM sounds terrifying to modern web developers, but it is plenty if you know what you are doing.<p>If you get <i>one</i> dedicated server for multiple separate projects, you can still keep the costs down but relax those constraints.<p>For example, look at the Hetzner server auction: <a href="https://www.hetzner.com/sb/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hetzner.com/sb/</a><p>I pay about 40 EUR a month for this:<p><pre><code> Disk: 736G / 7.3T (11%)
CPU: Intel Core i7-7700 @ 8x 4.2GHz [42.0°C]
RAM: 18004MiB / 64088MiB
</code></pre>
I put Proxmox on it and can have as many VMs as the IO pressure of the OSes will permit: <a href="https://www.proxmox.com/en/" rel="nofollow">https://www.proxmox.com/en/</a> (I cared mostly about storage so got HDDs in RAID 0, others might just get a server with SSDs)<p>You could have 15 VMs each with 4 GB of RAM and it would still come out to around 2.66 EUR per month per VM. It's just way more cost efficient at any sort of scale (number of projects) when compared to regular VPSes, and as long as you don't put any trash on it, Proxmox itself is fairly stable, being a single point of failure aside.<p>Of course, with refurbished gear you'd want backups, but you really need those anyways.<p>Aside from that, Hetzner and Contabo (opinions vary about that one though) are going to be more affordable even when it comes to regular VPS hosting. I think Scaleway also had those small Stardust instances if you want something really cheap, but they go out of stock pretty quickly as well.
There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM. By paying $20 instead of $5 you can get at least 8gb of RAM. You can use it for caches or a database that supports concurrent writes. The $15 difference won’t make any financial difference if you are trying to run a small business.<p>Thinking about on how to fit everything on a $5 VPS does not help your business.
$15 is not exactly zero, is it? If you don't need more than 1GB, why pay anything for more than 1GB?<p>I recall running LAMP stacks on something like 128MB about 20 years ago and not really having problems with memory. Most current website backends are not really much more complicated than they were back then if you don't haul in bloat.
It is. With 10k MRR it represents 0.15% of the revenue. Having the whole backend costing that much for a company selling web apps is like it’s costing zero.
Saving 15 USD on 10k+ USD MMR is ridiculous.
Saving 15 USD on 0 USD MMR while still building the business is priceless. Virtually infinite runway.
Given how much revenue depends on the experience of a web app and loading times, I’d be happy to pay 100$ a month on that revenue if I don’t have to sacrifice a second of additional loading time no matter how clever I was optimizing it.
That 1 second of loading time probably has more to do with heavy frontends and third-party scripts, than the backend server's capacity.<p>$100 is peanuts to most businesses, of course. But even so, I'd rather spend it on fixing an actual bottleneck.
There’s a happy medium and $5 for 1GB RAM just isn’t it.
NVME read latency is around 100usec, a SQLite3 database in the low terabytes needs somewhere between 3-5 random IOs per point lookup, so you're talking worst case for an already meaningful amount of data about 0.5ms per cold lookup. Say your app is complex and makes 10 of these per request, 5 ms. That leaves you serving 200 requests/sec before ever needing any kind of cache.<p>That's 17 million hits per day in about 3.9 MiB/sec sustained disk IO, before factoring in the parallelism that almost any bargain bucket NVME drive already offers (allowing you to at least 4x these numbers). But already you're talking about quadrupling the infrastructure spend before serving a single request, which is the entire point of the article.
You won't get such numbers on a $5 VPS, the SSDs that are used there are network attached and shared between users.
Not quite $5, but a $6.71 Hetzner VPS<p><pre><code> # ioping -R /dev/sda
--- /dev/sda (block device 38.1 GiB) ioping statistics ---
22.7 k requests completed in 2.96 s, 88.8 MiB read, 7.68 k iops, 30.0 MiB/s
generated 22.7 k requests in 3.00 s, 88.8 MiB, 7.58 k iops, 29.6 MiB/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 72.2 us / 130.2 us / 2.53 ms / 75.6 us</code></pre>
Rereading this, I have no idea where 3.9 MiB/sec came from, that 200 requests/sec would be closer to 8 MiB/sec
> There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM<p>There is a good reason: teaching yourself not to over-engineer, over-provision, or overthink, and instead to focus on generating business value to customers and getting more paying customers. I think it’s what many engineers are keen to overlook behind fun technical details.
> There is a good reason: teaching yourself not to over-engineer, over-provision, or overthink, (...)<p>This is specious reasoning. You don't prevent anything by adding artificial constraints. To put things in perspective, Hetzner's cheapest vCPU plan comes with 4GB of RAM.
I think we have to re-think and re-evaluate RAM usage on modern systems that use swapping with CPU-assisted page compression and fast, modern NVMe drives.<p>The Macbook Neo with 8GB RAM is a showcase of how people underistimated its capabilities due to low amount of RAM before launch, yet after release all the reviewers point to a larger set of capabilities without any issues that people didn't predict pre-launch.
$5 VPS disks are nowhere near macbooks, they are shared between users and often connected via network. They don't seat close to CPU.
Also, macOS is generally exceptional at caching and making efficient use of the fast solid state chips.
Or better yet, go with a euro provider like Hetzner and get 8GB of RAM for $10 or so. :)<p>Even their $5 plan gives 4GB.
> <i>There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM. By paying $20 instead of $5 you can get at least 8gb of RAM.</i><p>In my head, I call this the 'doubling algorithm'.<p>If there's anything that's both relatively cheap and useful, but where "more" (either in quality or quantity) has additional utility, 2x it.<p>Then 2x it again.<p>Repeat until either: the price change becomes noticeable or utility stops being gained.<p>Tl;dr -- saving order-of single dollars is rarely worth the tradeoffs.
Where can you get 8GB for $20?
It doesn't look like they think about how to make it fit though. They just use a known good go template
Hetzner, OVH and others offer 4-8gb and 2-4 cores for the same ~5$
Nice list! I'd say the SQLite with WAL is the biggest money saver mentioned.<p>One note: you can absolutely use Python or Node just as well as Go. There's Hetzner that offers 4GB RAM, 10TB network (then 1$/TB egress), 2CPUs machines for 5$.<p>Two disclaimers for VPS:<p>If you're using a dedicated server instead of a cloud server, just don't forget to backup DB to a Storage box often (3$ /mo for 1TB, use rsync). It's a good practice either way, but cloud instances seem more reliable to hardware faults. Also avoid their object store.<p>You are responsible for security. I saw good devs skipping basic SSH hardening and get infected by bots in <1hr. My go-to move when I spin up servers is a two-stage Terraform setup: first, I set up SSH with only my IP allowed, set up Tailscale and then shutdown the public SSH IP entrypoint completely.<p>Take care and have fun!
Personally for backups I’d avoid using a product provided by the same company as the VM I’m backing up. You should be defending against the individual VM suffering corruption of some kind, needing to roll back to a previous version because of an error you made, and finally your VM provider taking a dislike to you (rationally or otherwise) and shutting down your account.<p>If you’re backing up to a third party losing your account isn’t a disaster, bring up a VM somewhere else, restore from backups, redirect DNS and you’re up and running again. If the backups are on a disk you can’t access anymore then a minor issue has just escalated to an existential threat to your company.<p>Personally I use Backblaze B2 for my offsite backups because they’re ridiculously cheap, but other options exist and Restic will write to all of them near identically.
About security, wall of shame story,<p>Once I had Postgresql db with default password on a new vps, and forgetting to disable password based login, on a server with no domain. And it got hacked in a day, and was being used as bot server. And that was 10 years ago.<p>Recently deployed server, and was getting ssh login attempts within an hour, and it didn't had a domain. Fortunately, I've learned my lesson, and turned of password based login as soon as the server was up and running.<p>And similar attempts bogged down my desktop to halt.<p>Having an machine open to the world is now very scary. Thanks God for service like tailscale exists.
> Nice list! I'd say the SQLite with WAL is the biggest money saver mentioned.<p>Funny you said that. I migrated an old, Django web site to a slightly more modern architecture (docker compose with uvicorn instead of bare metal uWSGI) the other day, and while doing that I noticed that it doesn't need PostgreSQL at all. The old server had it already installed, so it was the lazy choice.<p>I just dumped all data and loaded it into an SQLite database with WAL and it's much easier to maintain and back up now.
> You are responsible for security. I saw good devs skipping basic SSH hardening and get infected by bots in <1hr. My go-to move when I spin up servers is a two-stage Terraform setup: first, I set up SSH with only my IP allowed, set up Tailscale and then shutdown the public SSH IP entrypoint completely.<p>Note that you don't need all of that to keep your SSH server secure. Just having a good password (ideally on a non-root account) is more than enough.
Disable password auth and go with key based, it's easier and more secure.
I'd call it unnecessary exposure. Under both modern threat models and classic cybernetic models (check out law of requisite variety) removing as much surface attack area as possible is optimal. Especially disabling passwords in SSH is infosec 1o1 these days. No need to worry about brute force attacks, credential stuffing, or simple human error, which was the cause of all attacks I've seen directly.<p>It's easier to add a small config to Terraform to make your config at least key-based.
I need more info about devs getting infected over ssh in less than an hour. Unless they had a comically weak root password or left VNC I don't believe it at all
First step is to get ssh setup correctly, and second step is to enable a firewall to block incoming connections on everything except the key ports (ssh but on a different port/web/ssl). This immediately eliminates a swathe of issues!
Does WAL really offer multiple concurrent writers? I know little about DBs and I've done a couple of Google searches and people say it allows concurrent reads while a write is happening, but no concurrent writers?<p>Not everybody says so... So, can anyone explain what's the right way to think about WAL?
No, it does not allow concurrent writes (with some exceptions if you get into it [0]). You should generally use it only if write serialisation is acceptable. Reads and writes are concurrent except for the commit stage of writes, which SQLite tries to keep short but is workload- and storage-dependent.<p>Now this is more controversial take and you should always benchmark on your own traffic projections, but:<p>consider that if you don't have a ton of indexes, the raw throughput of SQLite is so good that on many access patterns you'd already have to shard a Postgres instance anyway to surpass where SQLite single-write limitation would become the bottleneck.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.sqlite.org/src/doc/begin-concurrent/doc/begin_concurrent.md" rel="nofollow">https://www.sqlite.org/src/doc/begin-concurrent/doc/begin_co...</a>
No it doesn't - it allows a single writer and concurrent READs at the same time.
Thanks! even I run a sqlite in "production" (is it production if you have no visitors?) and WAL mode is enabled, but I had to work around concurrent writes, so I was really confused. I may have misunderstood the comments.
> Also avoid their object store.<p>Curious as to why you say this. I’m using litestream to backup to Hetzner object storage, and it’s been working well so far.<p>I guess itt’s probably more expensive than just a storage box?<p>Not sure but I also don’t have to set up cron jobs and the like.
Historical reliability and compatibility. They claimed they were S3 compatible, but they were requiring deprecated S3 SDKs, plus S3 advanced features are unimplemented (but at least they document it [0]). There was constant timeouts for object creation and updates, very slow speeds and overall instability. Even now, if you check out r/hetzner on reddit, you'll see it's a reliability nightmare (but take it with a grain of salt, nobody reports lack of problems). Not as relevant for DB backups, but billing is dumb, even if you upload a 1KB file, they charge you for 64KB.<p>At least with Storage Box you know it's just a dumb storage box. And you can SSH, SFTP, Samba and rsync to it reliably.<p>[0] <a href="https://docs.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/supported-actions/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/supported-ac...</a>
When creating a VPS on Hetzner, it lets you by default to configure the key auth only.
SQLite is fine, but I have ran Postgresql on a $20 server without any issues, and I would suggest if you have to deal with concurrent users and tasks, Postgresql is the way to go. SQLite WAL works, but sometimes it caused some issues, when you have a lot of concurrent tasks running continuously.<p>And, not sure I'm correct, but I felt Postgresql has more optimized storage if you have large text data than SQLite, at least for me I had storage full with SQLite, but same application on Postgresql never had this issue
This is supposed to be a contrarian opinion yet this is a retoric yapped non-stop in the “build in public” community. Of course lean is a good approach, it makes sense, and most engineers know this. Is not a new concept, we’ve been doing this for years in every branch of engineering.<p>The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist. This is just a story repeated ad nauseam to fit a narrative that help them justify their choices. This position is just as dogmatic, if not more, than the alleged dogma it attempts to disrupt.<p>Smart technical leaders knows that technical decisions only matter in context never in absolutes. The right answer is always “it depends”.<p>I can agree that there is a tendency to prematurely optimize infra, as a direct consequence of lack of measuring especially in young busy startups. One could argue that premature optimization might be the smart choice when you don’t have enough data, as in the best case scenario (your startup do well) you’ve saved some time, worst case scenario you’ve lost some money that depending on the situation might be less valuable than time spent in maintaining, and later refactoring, infra.
“people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist<p>Most people in the BiP these days barely know how to deploy a database or host something using nginx. it's all vercel, supabase, aws, clerk, yada yada. Cost aside, I think that people are addicted to complexity.
I've seen A LOT of public sector projects starting out with loads of Azure services and >$3000 montly bills for applications that could've easily run on a single VM.
This a structural problem not an awareness one. Is not like they don’t know they can run it on a 5$ VPS, the problem is that there are no incentives to do so. You’d be surprised to know how much of engineering is there to address organisational challenges rather than technical ones (ie: micro-services)
> <i>The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist.</i><p>Can confirm it exists, especially with founders self-coding with LLMs now.
I recall reading multiple AskHN posts about people trying to get attention from a cloud provider because they ran up thousands of dollars in charges accidentally. I've seen large companies do this too, even if you think something is just a dev environment, its the cloud provider's production environment and they will charge you per their ToS for everything you use, doesn't matter what the customer usage profile looks like.
Experienced dev with limited hands-on big tech infrastructure experience. Based on the results I get from LLMs in domains I understand how get they even get this stuff running using AI?
I can accept this is true, they will for sure exist. Of course if this they ability to make choices, technical or not, they are completely doomed.
> I bought a GitHub Copilot subscription in 2023, plugged it into standard VS Code, and never left. I tried Cursor and the other fancy forks when they briefly surpassed it with agentic coding, but Copilot Chat always catches up.<p>> Here is the trick that you might have missed: somehow, Microsoft is able to charge per request, not per token. And a "request" is simply what I type into the chat box. Even if the agent spends the next 30 minutes chewing through my entire codebase, mapping dependencies, and changing hundreds of files, I still pay roughly $0.04.<p>> The optimal strategy is simple: write brutally detailed prompts with strict success criteria (which is best practice anyway), tell the agent to "keep going until all errors are fixed," hit enter, and go make a coffee while Satya Nadella subsidizes your compute costs.<p>Wow. I'll definitely be investigating this!
People get banned abusing this per request strategy so be careful. This guy was running super long prompts per request and is somehow surprised why they got banned.<p><a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1r0wimi/if_you_create_a_long_todo_list_in_agent_mode_you/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1r0wimi/if_y...</a>
The author refers to gpt 4o and sonnet 3.5 as SOTA. I’d take the AI tips with a grain of salt tbh. But I’d love it if it’s true
Thanks for the downvote kind stranger. Not sure what I said to qualify
Just in case, if there are others like me who where wondering what does "MRR" means, it seems to be "monthly recurring revenue".
I'm just curious but is it the case that you signed up here 16 years ago and you didn't know what MRR means?
I was also curious about that, I would've thought especially in 2010 the startup ethos would've been more prevalent on HN whereas these days it's more about AI and big tech.
Not everybody who reads HN is well versed in business/entrepreneur oriented jagon.
HN means HackerNews btw, for those 15 year accounts that don't know the jargon
Yes. Clearly. But is the irony really lost on you?
Haha ^^'.<p>Honestly, yes. I'm on HN for tech content, I don't really care about startups and the business side of things, even though sometimes there are interesting reads on this side as well. Also, it may very well be the case that I rediscover the meaning of MRR for the second or third time in sixteen years :).
Obviously they are lacking the sigma hustle grindset.<p>Its like not having syphilis or cancer, its a good thing.
I was about to say: welcome to HN
There is also ARR which is "annual recurring revenue" and you should know that when people use ARR they usually are just making up numbers based on their current MRR (so lying). I've seen people announce their ARR after running their business for two whole months!
That's not really "lying" — ARR is usually understood as your projected "Annual Run Rate". It's a useful metric, as long as it is understood that it is an estimate.<p>But, in all honesty, <i>all</i> RR numbers are estimates. MRR is also a "made up number" from a certain point of view: it is not equivalent to cash received every month, because of annual subscriptions, cancelations, etc.
>But, in all honesty, all RR numbers are estimates.<p>Sure, but I would expect you to have at least one data point or at least near it, before making any estimates for that timescale.
I don't see many people make MRR projections based on 2 days of of sales, it's just something I've noticed with startups and ARR.
2 days is optimum, you can fit a nice curve - 1, 2 ... at the current rate we will have 536,870,912 by day 30.
Rather than lying, I think of it more as financial dead reckoning.
The text feels incoherent to me and lacks some nuance.<p>It starts about cutting costs by the choice of infrastructure and goes further to less resource hungry tools and cheaper services. But never compares the cost of these things. Do I save actually the upgrade to a bigger server by using Go and sqlite over let's say Python and postgres? Or does it not even matter when you have just n many users.
Then I do not understand why at one point the convenience of using OpenRouter is preferred over managing multiple API keys, when that should be cheaper and a cost point that could increase faster than your infrastructure costs.<p>There are some more points, but I do not want to write a long comment.
It actually starts with a completely unrelated anecdote:<p>"What do you even need funding for?"<p>I agree. The author claims to have multiple $10K MRR websites running on $20 costs. I also don't understand what he needs money for — shouldn't the $x0,000 be able to fund the $20 for the next project? It doesn't make any sense at all.<p>Then the author trails off and tells us how he runs on $20/month.<p>Well, why did you apply for funding? Hello?
Just because you start this lean doesn’t mean you should stay that way. Perhaps he’s now spending too much time managing his stack and not enough time on product development, customer service, a/o growth.<p>In other words, what gets you to $10k MRR isn’t the same thing(s) for 2x, 5x, or 10x that.
One can only assume the funding was needed to be able to afford
K8s and postgres? /s
I learned nothing. Most of this seems like common basic advice, wrapped up in AI written paragraphs...<p>Initially from the title, I thought it would be about brainstorming and launching a successful idea, and that sort of thing.
Usually when there's "on a [low] $/mo" you'll hear basic advice. You'd be surprised to find out many folks are not aware of this!
If you feel like it: start a blog! You have knowledge that you consider basic and a certain other subset of the population is interested in it and doesn't know it exists.
> Sometimes you need the absolute cutting-edge reasoning of Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o<p>Dead giveaway
I think it's good. I've definitely seen resource inflation exactly that OP is alluding to in enterprise. A desire to have some huge cloud based solution with AWS, spark bla bla when a python script with pandas in a cron job was faster.
Not only that, his whole business model seems to be "profit off the AI bubble and get the big techs to indirectly subsidize you"<p>Which obviously works, it's not like there aren't tons of multi-million startups ultimately doing the exact same thing, and yet. It feels a bit... trite?
Great stack! I'm doing a similar approach for my latest project (kavla.dev) but using fly.io and their suspend feature.<p>Scaling to zero with database persistence using litestream has cut my bill down to $0.1 per month for my backend+database.<p>Granted I still don't have that many users, and they get 200ms of extra latency if the backend needs to wake up. But it's nice to never have to worry about accidental costs!
When he switches from Kubernetes in the cloud to Nginx -> App Binary -> Sqlite he trades operations functionality for cost.<p>But, actually you can run Kubernetes and Postgres etc on a VPS.<p>See <a href="https://stack-cli.com/" rel="nofollow">https://stack-cli.com/</a> where you can specify a Supabase style infra on a low cost VPS on top of K3s.
I know this article is about the stack, but I'd like to point out that the success of the author has probably more to do with their marketing/sales strategy than their choice of technical infrastructure.<p>Something to remind to many tech folks on HN
Is it success or is the author running a 20k ad program to get 10k MRR. Such a useless metric.
Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity. Such a great adage.<p>Since I'm in finance I would say, Turnover is vanity, positive cashflow is sanity...but its not nearly as catchy
100% true. I ran a top 10 most visited Spanish language site on a Pentium III server. I have the technical chops to do all the articles says.<p>But 10k MRR sounds to me like travelling to Mars. I have 0 ideas and 0 initiative to push them ahead.
Yeah, 25 years in the industry, zero business ideas right here.<p>I can build whatever, I just have zero clue whatsoever what to build. Never have.
True. But he’s able to do marketing because he has the money, time and sense of priorities to do so.<p>The moral of the story is: Don’t be (another) fool, your tech stack is not your priority.
Anyone doing per tenant database with SQLITE + Litestream? Please share your experiences and pain points. I know migrations are one. The other challenge is locating the correct database from incoming request. What else?
Similar approach here. I run a side project on Next.js + Vercel (free tier) + Neon Postgres (free tier). Total hosting cost: $0/month.<p>The one place I'd push back on SQLite: if your app has any write concurrency from external processes (cron jobs, webhooks), WAL mode helps but you still hit lock contention. I have data collection scripts running every 30 minutes that write to the same DB the web app reads from. Postgres handled that cleanly from day one. Neon's free tier is 512MB with connection pooling — more than enough for a side project with real data.
I get that the focus of this article is on the tech portion, but I don't know anyone pitching today (aside from OpenAI) who is asking for big funding for the tech costs. It doesn't really matter if you built a system that costs you $200/month or $20/month if your lifetime value is $1000 and CAC is only $10 but you've got no money. That's what people want to fund. VC funding is gasoline you pour on a fire (or fuel for you rocket if you're being charitable) - it makes you go faster; a pitch that focuses on "slightly lower monthly op costs" is not attractive.
I'm taking the opposite approach - managed services all the way, and my monthly infrastructure costs are higher than what's described here.<p>No regrets. Infrastructure isn't the problem I'm trying to solve. The problem is: who's actually going to pay for this?<p>Optimizing infrastructure before you have customers is like designing a kitchen before you've written the menu. I launched within 72 hours of starting development and went straight to customer validation. The market feedback started coming in immediately.<p>Infrastructure costs show up in your bill. The cost of slow customer validation doesn't show up anywhere - until it's too late. That's the number I watch.
Some of this will depend on what experience you’ve got. Someone with lots of experience running Linux servers can probably stand up the sort of thing described in this article in a couple of hours from a starting point of being given the Go application source and a credit card.
It doesn’t sound like OP was optimizing anything; it sounds like they just knew how to use that stack, and so are able to get customer validation while also spending very little per month.
which approach works better depends on your financial situation and your existing setup. if you have money you can invest, then your approach works. if you have more time than money then invest the time instead. when you have built up your servers over the years, when building a new product, you can also do it quickly because the services you need are already running, and firing up a new database or a new server takes just as long as it takes to set up a managed service. but it doesn't add any cost.
The biggest cost when bootstrapping always seemed to be your salary to me, not infra costs. How long can you pay your mortgage and feed your kids off what should be your retirement or rainy day funds?
I was writing about this recently [0]. In the 2000s, we were bragging about how cheap our services are and are getting. Today, a graduate with an idea is paying $200 amounts in AWS after the student discounts. They break the bank and go broke before they have tested the idea. Programming is literally free today.<p>[0]: <a href="https://idiallo.com/blog/programming-tools-are-free" rel="nofollow">https://idiallo.com/blog/programming-tools-are-free</a>
> If you need a little breathing room, just use a swapfile.<p>You should always use a swap file/partition, even if you don't want any swapping. That's because there are always cold pages and if you have no swap space that memory cannot be used for apps or buffers, it's just wasted.
I always thought I had to add a swap file to avoid crashing with OOM. I wasn't aware of the cold pages overhead.<p>Sometimes that crashing is what I want: a dedicated server running one (micro)service in a system that'll restart new servers on such crashes (e.g. Kubernetes-alike). I'd rather have it crash immediately rather than chugging along in degraded state.<p>But on a shared setup like OP shows, or the old LAMP-on-a-vps, i'd prefer the system to start swapping and have a chance to recover. IME it quite often does. Will take a few minutes (of near downtime) but will avoid data corruption or crash-loops much easier.<p>Basically, letting Linux handle recovery vs letting a monitoring system handle recovery
AWS is not value for money, I do have a DO account that is great but my development is mostly hosted locally with tunnels from cloudflare, it is remarkable how far you (I) can get with that setup.
Last I saw, AWS has <i>way</i> better peering agreements than DO. Lots of problems with terrible throughput and lots of dropped packets for various clients (in several cities in North America, not just overseas or in the middle of nowhere) that vanished instantly on switching to AWS (including overseas ones that were also having problems)<p>Unfortunately, this isn’t something that shows up on spec sheets when you’re choosing a service. :-/
I concur with some of the commenters that this read as a bit of a brain dump. It has a thread connecting several loosely-related topics.<p>Observation #1: You can also solve the tech stack problem with Heroku. I think the author's stack probably has a steeper learning curve, but is a cheaper option. I think it's a bit of an odd comparison (I won't say straw-man, as I don't doubt some people do this) to go from a fully-controlled simple setup to using AWS with a pile of extra crap. You can also, for example, run something similar to what he or she is describing on AWS, Heroku etc. (I.e. without the things in the AWS diagram he indicated like kubernetes and load balancers.)<p>Observation #2: I have not found WAL mode is an antidote to SQLite locks during multiple concurrent writes. (This is anecdotal)<p>I think regarding Go vs Python/Ruby etc. I completely get that. I would now like to check out Go on web. I use Rust for most of my software writing, but am still on Python for web servers, because there is nothing I can use for Rust that is as powerful and easy as Django.
Do these things actually work? I've seen way too many gurus on twitter claiming to make 10K+ MRR every month. And then they quietly start applying for jobs. or selling courses instead of cashing in.
Pretty sure this is just written by AI... Why else would someone call "Sonnet 3.5 Sonnet and gpt 4o' high end models.
The most interesting thing in here is <a href="https://github.com/smhanov/laconic" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/smhanov/laconic</a> which is the author's "agentic research orchestrator for Go that is optimized to use free search & low-cost limited context window llms".<p>I have been doing this kind of thing with Cursor and Codex subscriptions, but they do have annoying rate limits, and Cursor on the Auto model seems to perform poorly if you ask it to do too much work, so I am keen to try out laconic on my local GPU.<p>EDIT:<p>Having tried it out, this may be a false economy.<p>The way it works is it has a bunch of different prompts for the LLMs (Planner, Synthesizer, Finalizer).<p>The "Planner" is given your input question and the "scratchpad" and has to come up with DuckDuckGo search terms.<p>Then the harness runs the DuckDuckGo search and gives the question, results, and scratchpad to the Synthesizer. The Synthesizer updates the scratchpad with new information that is learnt.<p>This continues in a loop, with the Planner coming up with new search queries and the Synthesizer updating the scratchpad, until eventually the Planner decides to give a final answer, at which point the Finalizer summarises the information in a user-friendly final answer.<p>That is a pretty clever design! It allows you to do relatively complex research with only a very small amount of context window. So I love that.<p>However I have found that the Synthesizer step is extremely slow on my RTX3060, and also I think it would cost me about £1/day extra to run the RTX3060 flat out vs idle. For the amount of work laconic can do in a day (not a lot!), I think I am better off just sending the money to OpenAI and getting the results more quickly.<p>But I still love the design, this is a very creative way to use a very small context window. And has the obvious privacy and freedom advantages over depending on OpenAI.
Yeah, came here to mention that too!<p>From the article:<p>>To manage all this, I built laconic, an agentic researcher specifically optimized for running in a constrained 8K context window. It manages the LLM context like an operating system's virtual memory manager—it "pages out" the irrelevant baggage of a conversation, keeping only the absolute most critical facts in the active LLM context window.<p>The 8K part is the most startling to me. Is that still a thing? I worked under that constraint in 2023 in the early GPT-4 days. I believe Ollama still has the default context window set to 8K for some reason. But the model mentioned on laconic GitHub (Qwen3:4B) should support 32K. (Still pretty small, but.. ;)<p>I'll have to take a proper look at the architecture, extreme context engineering is a special interest of mine :) Back when Auto-GPT was a thing (think OpenClaw but in 2023), I realized that what most people were using it for was just internet research, and that you could get better results, cheaper, faster, and <i>deterministically</i>, by just writing a 30 line Python script.<p>Google search (or DDG) -> Scrape top N results -> Shove into LLM for summarization (with optional user query) -> Meta-summary.<p>In such straightforward, specialized scenarios, letting the LLM drive was, and still is, "swatting a fly with a plasma cannon."<p>(The analog these days would be that many people would be better off asking Claw to write a scraper for them, than having it drive Chromium 24/7...)
> (The analog these days would be that many people would be better off asking Claw to write a scraper for them, than having it drive Chromium 24/7...)<p>Possibly. But possibly you have a very long tail of sites that you hardly ever look at, and that change more frequently than you use them, and maintaining the scraper is harder work than just using Chromium.<p>The dream is that the Claw would judge for itself whether to write a scraper or hand-drive the browser.<p>That might happen more easily if LLMs were a bit lazier. If they didn't like doing drudgery they would be motivated to automate it away. Unfortunately they are much too willing to do long, boring, repetitive tasks.
Yeah, I think the ideal setup is two-tier.<p>extremely lazy, large model<p><pre><code> +
</code></pre>
extremely diligent Ralph<p>Not sure if top model should be the biggest one though. I hear opposite opinions there. Small model which delegates coding to bigger models, vs big model which delegates coding to small models.<p>The issue is you don't want the main driver to be big, but it needs to be big enough to have common sense w.r.t. delegating both up[0] and down...<p>[0] i.e. "too hard for me, I will ping Opus ..." :) do models have that level of self awareness? I wanna say it can be after a failed attempt, but my failure mode is that the model "succeeds" but the solution is total ass.
The basic premise, try to be lean, is a good one. The implementation will clearly be debated with everyone having their own opinion on it but the core point is sound. I'd argue a different version of this though: keeping things lean forces simplicity and focus which is incredibly important early on. I have stepped into several startups and seen a mess of old/broken/I don't know what it does so leave it/etc etc. All of that, beyond the cost, slows you down because of the complexity. Regular gardening of your tech stack matters and has a lot of benefits.
One thing that I noticed was the mention of Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o as cutting-edge models when the blog was written 25 days ago. This sadly makes me suspect that this was written by a LLM instead of a person...
One thing that I noticed was the mention of Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o when the blog was written 25 days ago. This sadly makes me suspect that this was written by a LLM instead of a person...
Always good to challenge the narrative - but I don't pay for RDS Postgres because of the WAL, replication, all the beauty of pg etc. I pay RDS because it's largely set and forget. I am gladly paying AWS to think about it for me. I think at a certain scale, this is a really good tradeoff. At the very beginning it could be overkill, and at the top end obviously its unsuitable - but for most of us those tradeoffs are why it's successful.
I do appreciate the technical simplicity argument and I'm always advocating for it. And the few neat tricks i.e. Copilot.<p>That being said, I'd much rather read a few ideas for good recurring passive income. Instead, the author kind of flexes on that, then says "I get refused VC money because they don't see how their money would be useful for me" -- which is one more flex -- and moves on to the technical bits.<p>It's coming across as bragging to me.
I want to know how he’s identifying and monetizing businesses
This is my life goal right now. I have a bajillion ideas, know how to code them (even faster now), and just not enough time due to day job. A few questions:<p>How do you market them?<p>Is customer support an issue?<p>Do you see risk since ai makes it so easy to build/copy?
Where do you get your eh-trade.ca stock price data? Given the licensing fees, that seems like one of the greater challenges of bootstrapping anything with market data.
Modern tech stacks always remind me of this cartoon:<p><a href="https://www.toontales.net/short/lumber-jerks/" rel="nofollow">https://www.toontales.net/short/lumber-jerks/</a><p>Acme Toothpicks
This is how every website used to be run before everyone fell four the cloud trap.
20$ vs 300$ does not really matter if you have multiple 10K MRR.
It isn’t 10k MRR from day one. It also doesn’t make sense to think “well, now that I’m a big boy let’s move to a fancy stack , even if there is no need for it”
Exactly. Deciding on some very expensive subscriptions that can cost 1k per month or so might be worth thinking about, but this is just meaningless optimisation.
not at all meaningless. unless you have money to invest, at the beginning you don't have an income. i could not afford to spend $300 a month to host a new product that doesn't make any money yet. i can afford the $20 however, but then once the product does make money, why should i change it if it works?
Nice tech read, but without information about which companies, doing what, just feels way too click-baity.
Would be handy to actually see what these companies do…
I love SQLite and have ran it even on networked drives with queued writes for read-heavy applications. It’s an incredibly robust piece of software that’s often cost me pennies per month to serve 100k+ monthly users. But there’s definitely a time and place for solid, dedicated database servers like Postgres.
I think newer developers really need to learn that you can actually do production stuff using bare tools. It is not crazy, especially in the beginning, and it will save you a ton of money and time.
The biggest risk to cloud revenues is that everyone wakes up and realizes they could slash their cloud bills by 60+% quite quickly with just some minimal leaning.
While I applaud the acumen, this reads like watching a kid standing on the 3rd floor balcony shouting "look what I can do!"<p>$20/month. Yeah. Great, but why? You get a lot of peace of mind with "real" HA setup with real backups and real recovery, for not much more than $20, if you are careful.<p>Another half of article is about running "free, unlimited" local AI on a GPU (Santa brought it) with, apparently, free electricity (Santa pays for it).
This is similar to what I do. Linode, Debian, Go, HTMX, SQLite (with modernc.org/SQLite so I have no CGO dependency) and Caddy. If I have apps that need a lot of storage, I just add an S3 bucket.
I do it even more simpler: build in PHP and webhosting from Hetzner. All managed: email, sub-domains, name-servers, OS updates/patches etc.<p>I really started to enjoy managed servers/instances.
I read it as an article in defence of boring tech with a fancier/clickbaity title.<p>Here’s the more honest one i wrote a while back:<p><a href="https://aazar.me/posts/in-defense-of-boring-technology" rel="nofollow">https://aazar.me/posts/in-defense-of-boring-technology</a>
While I agree with your points, this one could be more nuanced:<p>> Infrastructure: Bare Server > Containers > Kubernetes<p>The problem with recommending a bare server first is that bare metal fails. Usually every couple of years a component fails - a PSU, a controller, a drive. Also, a bare metal server is more expensive than VPS.<p>Paradoxically, a k3s distro with 3 small nodes and a load balancer at Hetzner may cost you less than a bare metal server and will definitely give you much better availability in the long run, albeit with less performance for the same money.
In 5 years of running 3x Dell R620s 24/7 - which were already 9 years old when I got them - I had two sticks of RAM have ECC errors, and one PSU fail. The RAM technically didn’t <i>have</i> to be replaced, but I chose to. The PSU of course had a hot spare, so the system switched over and informed me without issue.<p>IME, hardware is much more reliable than people think.
We have gone full circle haven't we?
I decided to look at their website halfway through the post,<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/7M4PdO6" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/7M4PdO6</a><p>This is really what 10k mrr can get you? A badly designed AI slop website that isn't even mobile correctly compatible. The logo is white background on black website like a university project.<p>I can't believe that people are willingly spending money on this.
Does anybody know a good service to self host Ai? My graphics card is shit, I want to rent hardware to run my own models
Forget about the tech stack, how do I get multiple $10k MRR companies?
It always make me both roll my eyes and smile a little when i see someone daft enough to think they need some obscene setup - you dont. You never have. You are not Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. If you get to the point where you need that kind of setup you're already employing a dev ops team thats telling you that.<p>Stick whatever you're working on onto a ~$5/mo cheapo vps from someone like Hetzner, Digitalocean, etc and just get on with building your thing.
So what's the $10K MMR product, exactly? The lede is buried into nonexistence. Is it this one: <a href="https://www.websequencediagrams.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.websequencediagrams.com/</a> ...?<p>> Here is the trick that you might have missed: somehow, Microsoft is able to charge per request, not per token. And a "request" is simply what I type into the chat box. Even if the agent spends the next 30 minutes chewing through my entire codebase, mapping dependencies, and changing hundreds of files, I still pay roughly $0.04.<p>Really? Lol. If it's true why would you publish it? To ensure Microsoft will patch it up and fuck up your workflow?
It's already known. The trick is ms has very small context size. So it won't be much useful.
>Really? Lol. If it's true why would you publish it? To ensure Microsoft will patch it up and fuck up your workflow?<p>It's true and it's their official pricing, so talking about it won't change anything.<p>People are spending way too much money with Claude Code while they could simply pay for GitHub Copilot and fire up OpenCode to get the same results but way cheaper.
Can anybody validate this Github Copilot trick for accessign Opus 4.6? Sounds too good to be true.
Longtime happy Copilot user here. It's true.<p>The pricing is so good that it's the only way I do agentic coding now. I've never spent more than $40 in a month on Opus, and I give it large specs to work on. I usually spend $20 or so.
I'm not what I'd call a heavy user, but I've also mainly been using Copilot in VS Code on the basic sub.<p>You do get Opus 4.6, and it's really affordable. I usually go over my limits, but I'm yet to spend more than 5 USD on the surcharges.<p>Not seen a reason to switch, but YMMV depending on what you're doing and how you work.
It is true, it's the official pricing of GitHub Copilot.
Is infra where investors money is going? I imagined salaries would be it. Marketing costs maybe.
Very interesting insights on long running Llms locally.<p>Edited.
>The feedback was simply: "What do you even need funding for?"<p>Not clear from the text, but what was your plan using the funding on? If you did not have a plan, what did you expect? VCs want to see how adding more money results in asymmetric returns.
You already have and had everything you need to scale the business to max and it hasn’t happened so more money won’t help.<p>What do you want VC to do?<p>You didn’t bring a plan.
I was wondering this as well: Why did OP look for VC?<p>In my case, I've used a similar strategy of keeping costs under €100/month. (But have sold, or stopped my ventures before hitting such MRRs as OP reports).<p>I raised some capital to pay my own bills during development. But mostly to hire freelancers to work on parts that I'm bad at, or didn't have time for: advertising, a specific feature, a library, rewrite-in-rust (wink) or deep research into functional improvements.
I think making is the easiest part, would be really cool if you also reveal how you distribute what you are making for $20/mo.
Eh-trade.ca eh? The name spells the exit strategy this is seeking. Awesome idea and a great execution. Vertical scaling will take this simple setup far and probably far enough.
well, the guy runs what he runs and can't complain
If you can’t articulate what you need funding for, don’t be surprised if nobody will give it to you?
AI has solved the "code problem", but it hasn't solved the "marketing problem"…
You can get all the advantages and almost none of the constraints by buying a bigger base server for $50/m
Not my website. I found this interesting.
eh the super low cost only comes from low complexity. If complex, people pay more, features cost more, infra costs aren’t that big of a cost compared to dev time.
nice article, validates some of the things i already thought. although im sure things like aws and database servers etc are still useful for big companies
So is the slopaclypse gonna destroy HN too? 2nd from the top AI written non-proofread article
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What a fascinating article. I especially love the part about writing extremely detailed requests which only cost $0.04 versus the token approach most “vibe code” devs use. Fortunately his tactic is almost impossible to emulate for 90% of the YCombinator audience / HN commentators.<p>Why do I know this? Because there had to be a declaration here to stop using ChatGPT and other Agents to write YOUR OWN GODDAMN POSTS. Thinking isn’t your strong suit, Greed is, and taking the time to learn the power of English doesn’t satisfy the latter, so you minimize it to your own detriment.<p>Don’t get mad at me. Go punch a mirror.
LMFAO at Linode / Digital Ocean as lean servers.<p>Hetzner / Contabo maybe. Cloudflare workers definitely.<p>This guy is not at my level and multiple $10k MRR is possible but unlikely.
A lot of this advice is good or at least interesting. A lot of it is questionable. Python is completely fine for the backend. And using SQLite for your prod database is a bad idea, just use Postgres or similar.
There’s a lot to be said about his approach with go for simplicity. Python needs virtual environments, package managers, dependencies on disk, a wsgi/asgi server to run forked copies of the server, and all of that uses 4x-20x the ram usage of go. Docker usually gets involved around here and before you know it you’re neck deep in helm charts and cursing CNI configs in an EKS cluster.<p>The go equivalent of just coping one file across to a server a restarting its process has a lot of appeal and clearly works well for him.
Yes. It strikes me as odd how many people will put forward Python with the argument of "simplicity".<p>It is not. Simple. It may be "easy" but easy != simple (simple is hard, I tend to say).<p>I'm currently involved in a project that was initially layed out as microservices in rust and some go, to slowly replace a monolyth Django monstrosity of 12+ years tech debt.<p>But the new hires are pushing back and re-introducing python, eith that argument of simplicity. Sure, python is <i>much</i> easier than a rust equivalent. Esp in early phases. But to me, 25+ years developer/engineer, yet new to python, it's unbelievable complex.
Yes, uv solves some. As does ty and ruff. But, my goodness, what a mess to set up simple ci pipelines, a local development machine (that doesn't break my OS or other software on that machine). Hell, even the dockerfiles are magnitudes more complex than most others I've encountered.
Python will take you a long way, but its ceiling (both typical and absolute) is <i>far</i> lower than the likes of Go and Rust. For typical implementations, the difference may be a factor of ten. For careful implementations (of both), it can be a lot more than that.<p>Does the difference matter? You must decide that.<p>As for your dismissing SQLite: please justify why it’s a bad idea. Because I strongly disagree.
Why is SQLite bad for production database?<p>Yes, it has some things that behave differently than PostgreSQL but I am curious about why you think that.
I think the point is that your Python webapp will have more problems scaling to let's say 10,000 customers on a 5$ VPS tham Go. Of course you can always get beefier servers, but then that adds up for every project
Cool but missing the Claude Code or Coding Agent part imo