[CharlesW]

> …the cloud is total overkill for small startups and hobby projects.

It absolutely can be, sure. But solutions like Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, Supabase, etc. can be excellent and inexpensive for those use cases.

[meinheld111]

And surely a vivid tech stack does more to make you look good in front of vc‘s than an overkill architecture does make you look incompetent

[djbusby]

IME the investor cares more about Traction that Technology.

[mejutoco]

IDK, I remember seeing a tweet from Paul Graham saying that any new startup should use Typescript (I guess instead of js) so there might be some rules of thumb that some investors follow.

[ljm]

I consider them separate from the cloud on the basis they’re offering a platform as a service that just happens to re-sell cloud resources.

If you tried to replicate them on the same cloud provider, end to end, it would cost far more than they charge.

[mvdtnz]

Vercel is a lot of things but I don't think I've ever seen it referred to as "inexpensive".

[CharlesW]

So far, for my hobby projects it's basically free.

[mikeravkine]

This is exactly how the serverless guys "get you": Low traffic is nearly free but you pay for it on the slope of the scale cost ramp.

[CharlesW]

Sure, but aren't all cloud services notoriously expensive as you scale? At some point I assume you'd do what companies like Dropbox and Basecamp did, and re-host some or all of it.

[candiodari]

Well, yeah, but now it starts being totally ridiculous.

For small projects the cloud is not needed, and a lot of effort that won't pay off. The only case where it'll pay off is if you "go viral" and rapidly need to increase capacity.

This is not free. While the cloud helps with scaling, your application still needs to support it. So there's a development cost to it, even when starting.

Then, if you scale, the cost makes it almost a necessity to rapidly get back off of the cloud ...