[GFischer]

I tried making the software cost for my side projects $0, and the non-Microsoft community does make it feasible, but I'm way too invested in Microsoft tools, so the productivity hit was way too steep.

I started with a stack of Grails + PostgreSQL, hosted on AWS (Elastic Beanstalk, etc.), it worked pretty nicely (I was particularly impressed with the ease of use of Elastic Beanstalk for an absolute newbie).

What I need is some free time, or a job switch (working on the 2nd part :) ).

Still, I tried most IDEs and other ways of development (Eclipse, IntelliJ, Sublime Text), and I still like Visual Studio the most. I also like Microsoft SQL Server a lot.

The Microsoft stack is certainly a lot more expensive than an equivalent stack if you have to pay for it, but having the BizSpark option, it makes a lot of sense if you come from a Microsoft background.