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Comment by yoaso

5 hours ago

I'm taking the opposite approach - managed services all the way, and my monthly infrastructure costs are higher than what's described here.

No regrets. Infrastructure isn't the problem I'm trying to solve. The problem is: who's actually going to pay for this?

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.

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.