[bsnnkv]

I bootstrapped Notado[1][2] and Kullish[3] in Rust. Best tech stack decisions I ever made.

Similar setups (Rocket and Actix instead of Axum, Tera instead of Askama, Diesel instead of SQLx) and overall experience (incredibly cheap, reliable, and since these projects have been running a long time, amazingly easy to return to the codebases after months/years and make changes with a high level of confidence).

I distinctly remember how happy I felt the first time I realized that I had enough paying subscribers to offset the cost of the running the service!

[1]: https://notado.app

[2]: it had a decent amount of HN discussion last week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697228

[3]: https://kulli.sh

[lukaesch]

That's awesome! Reaching the point where subscribers cover costs is a huge milestone. Rust's reliability making it easy to revisit projects is a big plus. How do you find Rocket and Actix compared to Axum? Why Tera instead of Askama? Would love to hear your take!

[bsnnkv]

Rocket/Actix/Axum are all similar enough; I've used them all and I find Rocket the most ergonomic for web apps, Actix for pure backend APIs. I have spent less time working in Axum since it is the newest, but I don't have anything "bad" to say about it.

I started with Rocket for Notado, but because there was a long period of pre v0.5 stagnation, I went with Actix for Kullish. These days I'd be happy starting a new project with either.

As for Tera over Askama, I don't think Askama was around when I started building Notado; Tera was the first templating engine I used in Rust and I learned its ins and outs pretty well, so now it's just the default thing that I reach for whenever I'm building a web app.