How to save $13.27 on your SaaS bill

https://dgerrells.com/blog/how-to-save-13-27-on-your-saas-bill

by rustystump • 2 years ago

179 76 2 years ago

c0balt• 2 years ago

The writing style is gold. The technical approach too was quite entertaining.

zygo• 2 years ago

I also did the same, built my own analytics with TinyBird for one of my projects (https://linkycal.com). It ended up costing less than paying for a hosting provider

Eiriksmal• 2 years ago

This makes me tired. I know it's supposed to be humorous self deprecation, but it's soul crushing to see the pseudo real-time thought process behind the fantastically over-engineered setups from my day jobs. All for someone's humble blog?

Obligatory HN footnote: My blog costs $6 a month to serve HTML from digital ocean. Landing in the top five links a few times on HN didn't make the Linux load blip much past 0.20. GoAccess analyzes nginx traffic logs for free, if you want to know what countries are scraping your pages.

langcss• 2 years ago

Exactly same here using digital ocean app service. $5 a month as no backup is needed :-). A CDN does most of the heavy lifting.

aitchnyu• 2 years ago

Tangential, is there a single provider which does (Python) app platform (web, cron, workers) and hosted Postgres plan costing 10 usd a month? A VPS still seems most compelling option for me.

fragmede• 2 years ago

serving static files via nginx is easy on the compute. I'm serving something a tiny bit more complex (instructions at http://funky.nondeterministic.computer) and the $5 DO droplet couldn't keep up. I had to upgrade to a $12/mo server to keep up.

devbent• 2 years ago

Vultr does me cheaper than DO for a given amount of oomph.

calvinmorrison• 2 years ago

add the extra $1/mo for backups and you're golden.

umvi3• 2 years ago

If you are only serving static content, it's hard to beat GitHub pages.

rustystump• 2 years ago

i love gp. this one almost didn't fit on it because I wanted to serve a small db file to the client rather pay for remote. Luckily I was able to keep it under their pretty generous file limit.

https://github.com/dgerrells/liftme

https://dgerrells.github.io/liftme/

oefrha4• 2 years ago

GitHub Pages is pretty bad for static content with its universal

  Cache-Control: max-age=600

that can’t be changed. Your assets should have much longer expiry and hopefully be immutable. Just get a server, it’s cheap and you can do proper cache control and you’re not beholden to your Microsoft overlord.

CuriousCosmic• 2 years ago

Or cloudflare pages. As far as I can tell static content is served at no cost and dynamic requests have very generous free limits (something like 100k requests/day)

weitendorf• 2 years ago

Cloudflare pages is better overall because it’s trivially easy to integrate with DNS for your custom domain/cloudflare workers, and handles staged changes better IMO. You can point it at a GitHub repo so unless you have a complex build it’s easy to setup.

Unfortunately IME it’s not a super well-polished product though (I can’t for the life of me get their CLI “wrangler” to login to a headless machine, and their HTTP APIs are not documented well enough to use for non-git file sources, so I can’t get it to work in my not-so-special dev environment setup). So it’s only better if you can get it to work, although that’s something you’ll probably figure out in the first 5-10m of using it.

arp2422• 2 years ago

The main downside of GitHub pages is that they don't support running your own Jekyll plugins from _plugins; sometimes it's just a lot easier to write a bit of Ruby code. That said, you can just generate stuff locally and push the result, but that's the main reason I've been using Netlify.

talldayo• 2 years ago

My main server costs $0, but only because I sold my soul to Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

throwup238• 2 years ago

Souls really don't go for much nowadays, do they. Faustian bargains used to at least get you some magic powers and renewed youth.

"I sold my soul and all I got was a $5 virtual machine"

mrecondo• 2 years ago

Good times. I'm on Oracle too but now they decided to charge me for "compute" and nothing changed at my server :(

Time to jump ship

RockRobotRock• 2 years ago

I tried it, and man is it just the worst interface in the world. $50/yr for a cheap VPS from somewhere else was worth it to me.

hinkley• 2 years ago

So it cost you everything...

BossingAround• 2 years ago

The last time I tried, I couldn't get a VM running for whatever reason. Any issues with OC?

pjc50• 2 years ago

Oracle cloud is suspiciously good. They also claim not to do the AWS thing: if you exceed the free limits, they'll just shut you down rather than bill you absurd amounts of money. I guess that's reserved for the Java and DB billing divisions.

Their free tier gives you quite a lot of disk. The catch is being capped at 10Mbit, which can be mitigated by .. Cloudflare!

mindslight• 2 years ago

The difficulty with the "sold your soul" meme is that preserving your soul is a moving target. I've got some Oracle free tier instances. They get deployed with nixos-rebuild, same as anything else. The main difference between them and any other virtual server provider is when I've got to do something that requires logging in to the overwrought web interface, it's slightly less friendly than other providers (the IP config is a bit weird, too).

Using an offering from a specific company is not selling your soul. Selling your soul entails adopting something in a way that you become reliant upon it, giving whomever controls it leverage over you. The chief one these days is using Proprietary Software 2.0, and especially writing significant code that ends up inextricably wed to it. That can include the Oracle Cloud API, but it also includes every other lock-in-hopeful proprietary service API, including all of these "easy" and "free tier" offerings from not-yet-openly-associated-with-evil SaaS "startups".

So in short if you're choosing between some proprietary solution that offers "free" hosting (eg Heroku, Github pages, anything "serverless", etc) and Oracle free tier that gives you bog standard VMs on which you can run common libre software, choose the Oracle free tier route and don't think twice. If Oracle engages in "altering the deal", then the most you'll be on the hook for is $5/mo at a different provider rather than having to completely redo your setup.

kgdiem• 2 years ago

Any reason not to use S3 static hosting and cloudflare? I host at least 4 sites for between $0.03-0.1/month this way.

booi• 2 years ago

I do this too! It’s kind of a pain to set all the right headers and such though. I use a deployment tool called s3_website but it seems abandoned…

LVB• 2 years ago

I did that for years but have recently switched to Cloudflare Pages. Cost are negligible either way, but Cloudflare auto publishing straight from a GitHub webhook out of my repo is slightly fewer components.

tyre• 2 years ago

All for someone's humble blog?

Maybe they did it to have fun

jstummbillig• 2 years ago

I am guessing here, but part of the critique might be that definition of fun

ENGNR• 2 years ago

It seems like just a practice run to give the latest fancy hype a spin. Bonus points - they got a blog out of it too.

mosselman• 2 years ago

I am sure he had a hell of a lot of fun though.

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

I think humans are tinkerers. Given a choice between utilitarian productivity and tinkering, unless it's a life or a death situation, people will go ham on the tinkering. Especially for such low risk things as one's personal blogs.

Now what is maybe a bit strange is companies like Vercel having massive valuations because of this. I said in another comment somewhere does anyone actually use them beyond the free or low cost tiers?

cqqxo4zV46cp• 2 years ago

I am open to ideas on why this happens but my guess is because bun isn't written in rust.

liked, commented, and subscribed.

bigiain• 2 years ago

The Rust Evangelism Task Force lives on.

(I wonder what the n-gate author is up to? I hope they're happy and doing something fun. I miss their HN summaries...)

snypher• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27840433

cr125rider• 2 years ago

I’m very impressed that Vercel is able to sell so little for so much. They do the very bare bones hosting and charge a fortune to run everyone’s inefficient JavaScript framework of the month to replicate the speed and simplicity of a static site. Amazing.

zaviermiller• 2 years ago

I had a personal project that was slightly more complex than something like a digital form and I wasn't even able to run it for free (I have zero users, why would I pay?)

At least the Heroku free tier could run all my apps. RIP

mubu• 2 years ago

On Vercel? How? As long as it's non commercial you should be able to just run it for free there

reducesuffering• 2 years ago

1: Vercel is running millions of personal Next.js static sites for free.

2: Inefficient in what sense? In my experience, most of the latest software startups are shipping incredibly quick with Next.js / Vercel stack infra. TS/JS is still a much faster runtime (and only one with types) than the practical alternatives of Python, Ruby, and PHP. There is a single digit percentage shipping new startups in Java/C#. Go could make a decent case.

3: IMO the Next.js / Vercel deployment experience is far far better than what I dealt with wrangling Django templates / non-template integration / deploying anywhere else.

In Django VPS land, you can follow this guide and encounter multiple issues particular to your setup: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

and figure out Dokku deployments or GitHub action CI issues.

On Next.js / Vercel, you can:

1: Click a button linking github and Vercel.

2: Enter .env on Vercel

3: git push

girvo• 2 years ago

They own React at this point, it seems. More and more hires I'm coming across know Next.js rather than React itself, and Vercel is now a massive part of the core React contributor team...

tkzed49• 2 years ago

What does this mean? How do you "know" nextjs without knowing React? Do you mean they've heard of it and list it on their resume?

throw0101a• 2 years ago

Somewhat disappointed they could not save an extra dime (10¢; $0.10):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

fancyfredbot• 2 years ago

I think he'd have hit that if he'd used Rust.

coffeekitkat• 2 years ago

I like the writing! I enjoyed the reading of it.

inhumantsar• 2 years ago

I live on the edge, the edge of the network, the browser, the bleeding edge. Everything must be serverless, multi-region, edge delivered, eventually consistent, strongly typed, ACID compliant, point in time recovery, buzzword buzzword, and buzzword bazzword.

theseagin• 2 years ago

I quite liked the blog. Minus all the bleeding edge stuff, I build an analytics website for me a few months ago and it was quite fun. Later extended it to included some real time insights on the performance of my sites.

mrcartmeneses• 2 years ago

Clearly the author has never heard of tinypng.com

voidUpdate• 2 years ago

or webp

llmblockchain• 2 years ago

pngcrush !

renewiltord• 2 years ago

This was a fun read, haha.

I am open to ideas on why this happens but my guess is because bun isn't written in rust.

LOL classic. I love Rust and I enjoy when people take the piss out of us fans.

I do use SQLite every now and then but I'm always surprised by how low-latency and high-throughput it is. I have bad intuition for how efficient it is. Good stuff!

ctippett• 2 years ago

Another saga from the gypity chronicles!

I really like this author's writing style. It feels like I'm reading my own inner monologue.

Havoc• 2 years ago

Some of that style/humour reminds me of primeagen

rigrassm• 2 years ago

Pretty sure it's "Squeeh" and "Gypity" giving it those vibes (I know he's the one that led to me calling it "Gypity" and he always pronounces SQL "Squeal). Solid bet that the author is a consumer of Primeagen content.

How to save $13.27 on your SaaS bill

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