I'm curious how the lifetime pricing model work for you as a founder. Are you able to bootstrap this yourself and stay within budget with all the compute and hosting cost?
For me, the project was not primarily about money. It was more about gaining initial experience as a SaaS owner and what I need to do to run a successful project.
My costs are actually relatively low, I pay 5 euros a month for my VPS and the domain is only 7 euros a year... I can manage that!
Your vps costs are low now. But won't be forever when your database usage and traffic grow.
Even if a $10 vps can handle the traffic, the provider might rate limit you.
Let's be optimistic and assume the following over the next year:
- You get 100 paid users from initial launch. You'll need an advertising budget to gain more.
- And 500 free users over time because they'll keep coming.
Can you support 600 users with $1000 for a year? And this is not about vps costs, it's your time as well, you'll need to manage the vps and respond to customer tickets whether it's bug fixes, performance issues, or feature requests.
I think $10/first year is reasonable to test out your SaaS idea, you'll pay a lot out of pocket, but it'll give you the chance to evaluate and workout your pricing model over the first year.
My costs are actually relatively low, I pay 5 euros a month for my VPS and the domain is only 7 euros a year... I can manage that!