Comment by faangguyindia

4 hours ago

>if you need to keep monthly services spend as low as possible but you have extra time to spend, such as with a hobby project.

We did not have any budget constraints at all.

Depending on 3rd party meant:

1. Begging for issues where project owner has marked them "won't fix"

2. Navigating hundreds of features we don't use, don't need and not having features we absolutely need but they don't have.

3. Weird gotchas and cost saving implemented by them, where we do not want to save any money.

>When we started to add up all of the time spent managing everything it starts to look like spending dollars (of engineer time) to save pennies on SaaS bills.

We actually factored all costs, our self hosted solution are "very lean" and still come out ahead when you factor in time/cost.

>spending dollars (of engineer time) to save pennies on SaaS bills.

I ran by this for long time fasely believing "engineers are way more expensive than cloud bills, so these thousands of dollars we are spending on these services don't matter"

but when we actually got down to fixing all , we realised now it costs us 1/10th of what it used to with more flexibility and reliability.

>Probably not a popular thing to say on HN, but I now try to stay away from teams that go to extremes to self-host everything because I just want to get my work done, not also be constantly involved in running the underlying services

we found exact opposite tbh, integrating into others hurt our performance, wasted our time, made us frustrated and desperate.

Only external service we use now are Anycast for serving our sub millisecond api and "billing", yes billing because it has lots of edge cases, taxes and all wicked things we can't manage on our own.