Comment by cpursley

1 month ago

Yep, this is why I'm a proponent of paas until the bill actually hurts. Just pay the heroku/render/fly tax and focus on product market fit. Or, play with servers and K8s, burning your investors money, then move on to the next gig and repeat...

The moment I sign up for a PaaS the bill hurts. I can never get over the fact I can get 1000x more compute for the same price, never mind that I never use it and have to set everything up myself. I’ll just never pay to lock myself in to something so restricted. My dedicated server allows me to do anything I want or need.

  • If you enjoy playing with servers instead of shipping features, enjoy!

    • That’s only true if you still have to learn how to deploy to a server. I have the opposite problem. I need to learn how to deploy to these wonky services, and it never seems to transfer from one to the other.

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> Or, play with servers and K8s, burning your investors money, then move on to the next gig and repeat...

I mean, of the two, the PaaS route certainly burns more money, the exception being the rare shop that is so incompetent they can't even get their own infrastructure configured correctly, like in GP's situation.

There are guaranteed more shops that would be better off self-hosting and saving on their current massive cloud bills than the rare one-offs that actually save so much time using cloud services, it takes them from bankruptcy to being functional.

  • > the PaaS route certainly burns more money,

    Does it? Vercel is $20/month and Neon starts at $5/month. That obviously goes up as you scale up, but $25/month seems like a fairly cheap place to start to me.

    (I don't work for Vercel or Neon, just a happy customer)

Yeah, same. Vercel + Neon and then if you actually have customers and actually end up paying them enough money that it becomes significant, then you can refactor and move platforms, but until you do, there are bigger fish to fry.

  • 100%. Making it a docker container and deploying it is literally a few hours at most.