[welanes]

Things are much easier for one-person startups these days—it's a gift.

I remember building a todo app as my first SaaS project, and choosing something called Stormpath for authentication. It subsequently shut down, forcing me to do a last-minute migration from a hostel in Japan using Nitrous Cloud IDE (which also shut down). Just pain upon pain.[1]

Now, you can just pick a full-stack cloud service and run with it. My latest SaaS[2] is built on Google Cloud, so Authentication, Cloud Functions, Docker containers, logging, etc straight out of the box.

Not to mention, modern JavaScript and CSS are finally good. With so many fewer headaches, it’s a great time to build.

[1] Admittedly, I was new to software dev and made some rather poor tech choices

[2] https://simplescraper.io

[robertlagrant]

How do you find the costs involved with a cloud service like that? I remember getting bitten once with a bill from Azure because a service went wild with logging once.

[joshstrange]

Also solo founder here, for myself you just have to watch costs like a hawk when you make any big changes. AWS and friends have calculators but there is only so much you can estimate and it’s hard to know the usage patterns till something is live.

I’m lucky that my work is event-based, as is it used by in-person live events so my usage comes in waves (pre-sales a month or two out, steady traffic the week leading up to the event, and high traffic the day before or week/day of the event). This means that at worst I only have to ride out the current “wave” and then I have some amount of time before the next event (gives me an opportunity to fix run-away costs.

One of my big runaway costs was when I tried to use something like Datadog/NewRelic/Baseline. You work yourself up to the cost of the service, make your peace with it (the best you can, since it’s also hard to estimate), then get hit with AWS fees (that none of the providers call out) for things like CloudWatch when they are pulling logs/metrics out. I’ve had the CloudWatch bills be 4-6x as expensive as the service itself and it’s a complete surprise (or was the first time). Thankfully AWS refunded it when it happened. I caught it after 2 days and had run up a few hundred dollars in that time, I could have handled it but thankfully they refunded it for me.

The second runaway cost was Google Maps, once you fall off that free tier the costs accumulate quickly. In just a few days I had a couple hundred in fees from that. I scrambled a switch to ProtonMaps and took my costs down to a couple dollars a month.

[robertlagrant]

Hah - yes DataDog is what we moved to after the grand Azure fail. That was better, in that costs were more controllable, but you have to learn their billing world, which is in itself very painful.

All these services are predicated on the idea that you never want your site to go down, and will pay anything to keep it running. So if you start logging gigabytes a second, in the old world your VPS would've started failing and your website's buttons would start showing errors to the user. Now, the user doesn't see an error, but you get charged hundreds or thousands of dollars a month to keep it up, even if your website generates you $50/mo.