You should always use a swap file/partition, even if you don't want any swapping. That's because there are always cold pages and if you have no swap space that memory cannot be used for apps or buffers, it's just wasted.

Initially from the title, I thought it would be about brainstorming and launching a successful idea, and that sort of thing.

What do you want VC to do?

You didn’t bring a plan.

One note: you can absolutely use Python or Node just as well as Go. There's Hetzner that offers 4GB RAM, 10TB network (then 1$/TB egress), 2CPUs machines for 5$.

Two disclaimers for VPS:

If you're using a dedicated server instead of a cloud server, just don't forget to backup DB to a Storage box often (3$ /mo for 1TB, use rsync). It's a good practice either way, but cloud instances seem more reliable to hardware faults. Also avoid their object store.

You are responsible for security. I saw good devs skipping basic SSH hardening and get infected by bots in <1hr. My go-to move when I spin up servers is a two-stage Terraform setup: first, I set up SSH with only my IP allowed, set up Tailscale and then shutdown the public SSH IP entrypoint completely.

Take care and have fun!

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/programming-tools-are-free

Scaling to zero with database persistence using litestream has cut my bill down to $0.1 per month for my backend+database.

Granted I still don't have that many users, and they get 200ms of extra latency if the backend needs to wake up. But it's nice to never have to worry about accidental costs!

Hetzner / Contabo maybe. Cloudflare workers definitely.

This guy is not at my level and multiple $10k MRR is possible but unlikely.

I don't want to diss SQLite because it is awesome and more than adequate for many/most web apps but you can connect to Postgres (or any DB really) on localhost over a Unix domain socket and avoid nearly all of the overhead.

It's not much harder to use than SQLite, you get all of the Postgres features, it's easier to run reports or whatever on the live db from a different box, and much easier if it comes time to setup a read replica, HA, or run the DB on a different box from the app.

I don't think running Postgres on the same box as your app is the same class of optimistic over provisioning as setting up a kubernetes cluster.

> Here is the trick that you might have missed: somehow, Microsoft is able to charge per request, not per token. And a "request" is simply what I type into the chat box. Even if the agent spends the next 30 minutes chewing through my entire codebase, mapping dependencies, and changing hundreds of files, I still pay roughly $0.04.

Really? Lol. If it's true why would you publish it? To ensure Microsoft will patch it up and fuck up your workflow?

I have been doing this kind of thing with Cursor and Codex subscriptions, but they do have annoying rate limits, and Cursor on the Auto model seems to perform poorly if you ask it to do too much work, so I am keen to try out laconic on my local GPU.

EDIT:

Having tried it out, this may be a false economy.

The way it works is it has a bunch of different prompts for the LLMs (Planner, Synthesizer, Finalizer).

The "Planner" is given your input question and the "scratchpad" and has to come up with DuckDuckGo search terms.

Then the harness runs the DuckDuckGo search and gives the question, results, and scratchpad to the Synthesizer. The Synthesizer updates the scratchpad with new information that is learnt.

This continues in a loop, with the Planner coming up with new search queries and the Synthesizer updating the scratchpad, until eventually the Planner decides to give a final answer, at which point the Finalizer summarises the information in a user-friendly final answer.

That is a pretty clever design! It allows you to do relatively complex research with only a very small amount of context window. So I love that.

However I have found that the Synthesizer step is extremely slow on my RTX3060, and also I think it would cost me about £1/day extra to run the RTX3060 flat out vs idle. For the amount of work laconic can do in a day (not a lot!), I think I am better off just sending the money to OpenAI and getting the results more quickly.

But I still love the design, this is a very creative way to use a very small context window. And has the obvious privacy and freedom advantages over depending on OpenAI.

But, actually you can run Kubernetes and Postgres etc on a VPS.

See https://stack-cli.com/ where you can specify a Supabase style infra on a low cost VPS on top of K3s.

Thinking about on how to fit everything on a $5 VPS does not help your business.

And, not sure I'm correct, but I felt Postgresql has more optimized storage if you have large text data than SQLite, at least for me I had storage full with SQLite, but same application on Postgresql never had this issue

Here’s the more honest one i wrote a while back:

https://aazar.me/posts/in-defense-of-boring-technology

Why do I know this? Because there had to be a declaration here to stop using ChatGPT and other Agents to write YOUR OWN GODDAMN POSTS. Thinking isn’t your strong suit, Greed is, and taking the time to learn the power of English doesn’t satisfy the latter, so you minimize it to your own detriment.

Don’t get mad at me. Go punch a mirror.

Not clear from the text, but what was your plan using the funding on? If you did not have a plan, what did you expect? VCs want to see how adding more money results in asymmetric returns.

Saying "you can just run things on a cheap VPS" sounds amateurish: people are immediately out with "Yeah but scaling", "Yeah but high availability", "Yeah but backups", "Yeah but now you have to maintain it" arguments, that are basically regurgitated sales pitches for various cloud platforms. It's learned helplessness.

It starts about cutting costs by the choice of infrastructure and goes further to less resource hungry tools and cheaper services. But never compares the cost of these things. Do I save actually the upgrade to a bigger server by using Go and sqlite over let's say Python and postgres? Or does it not even matter when you have just n many users. Then I do not understand why at one point the convenience of using OpenRouter is preferred over managing multiple API keys, when that should be cheaper and a cost point that could increase faster than your infrastructure costs.

There are some more points, but I do not want to write a long comment.

$20/month. Yeah. Great, but why? You get a lot of peace of mind with "real" HA setup with real backups and real recovery, for not much more than $20, if you are careful.

Another half of article is about running "free, unlimited" local AI on a GPU (Santa brought it) with, apparently, free electricity (Santa pays for it).

https://imgur.com/a/7M4PdO6

This is really what 10k mrr can get you? A badly designed AI slop website that isn't even mobile correctly compatible. The logo is white background on black website like a university project.

I can't believe that people are willingly spending money on this.

If you get one dedicated server for multiple separate projects, you can still keep the costs down but relax those constraints.

For example, look at the Hetzner server auction: https://www.hetzner.com/sb/

I pay about 40 EUR a month for this:

  Disk: 736G / 7.3T (11%)
  CPU: Intel Core i7-7700 @ 8x 4.2GHz [42.0°C]
  RAM: 18004MiB / 64088MiB

You could have 15 VMs each with 4 GB of RAM and it would still come out to around 2.66 EUR per month per VM. It's just way more cost efficient at any sort of scale (number of projects) when compared to regular VPSes, and as long as you don't put any trash on it, Proxmox itself is fairly stable, being a single point of failure aside.

Of course, with refurbished gear you'd want backups, but you really need those anyways.

Aside from that, Hetzner and Contabo (opinions vary about that one though) are going to be more affordable even when it comes to regular VPS hosting. I think Scaleway also had those small Stardust instances if you want something really cheap, but they go out of stock pretty quickly as well.

Something to remind to many tech folks on HN

Stick whatever you're working on onto a ~$5/mo cheapo vps from someone like Hetzner, Digitalocean, etc and just get on with building your thing.

> Here is the trick that you might have missed: somehow, Microsoft is able to charge per request, not per token. And a "request" is simply what I type into the chat box. Even if the agent spends the next 30 minutes chewing through my entire codebase, mapping dependencies, and changing hundreds of files, I still pay roughly $0.04.

> The optimal strategy is simple: write brutally detailed prompts with strict success criteria (which is best practice anyway), tell the agent to "keep going until all errors are fixed," hit enter, and go make a coffee while Satya Nadella subsidizes your compute costs.

Wow. I'll definitely be investigating this!

Edited.

I really started to enjoy managed servers/instances.

No regrets. Infrastructure isn't the problem I'm trying to solve. The problem is: who's actually going to pay for this?

Optimizing infrastructure before you have customers is like designing a kitchen before you've written the menu. I launched within 72 hours of starting development and went straight to customer validation. The market feedback started coming in immediately.

Infrastructure costs show up in your bill. The cost of slow customer validation doesn't show up anywhere - until it's too late. That's the number I watch.

That being said, I'd much rather read a few ideas for good recurring passive income. Instead, the author kind of flexes on that, then says "I get refused VC money because they don't see how their money would be useful for me" -- which is one more flex -- and moves on to the technical bits.

It's coming across as bragging to me.

https://www.toontales.net/short/lumber-jerks/

Acme Toothpicks

How do you market them?

Is customer support an issue?

Do you see risk since ai makes it so easy to build/copy?

The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist. This is just a story repeated ad nauseam to fit a narrative that help them justify their choices. This position is just as dogmatic, if not more, than the alleged dogma it attempts to disrupt.

Smart technical leaders knows that technical decisions only matter in context never in absolutes. The right answer is always “it depends”.

I can agree that there is a tendency to prematurely optimize infra, as a direct consequence of lack of measuring especially in young busy startups. One could argue that premature optimization might be the smart choice when you don’t have enough data, as in the best case scenario (your startup do well) you’ve saved some time, worst case scenario you’ve lost some money that depending on the situation might be less valuable than time spent in maintaining, and later refactoring, infra.

Observation #1: You can also solve the tech stack problem with Heroku. I think the author's stack probably has a steeper learning curve, but is a cheaper option. I think it's a bit of an odd comparison (I won't say straw-man, as I don't doubt some people do this) to go from a fully-controlled simple setup to using AWS with a pile of extra crap. You can also, for example, run something similar to what he or she is describing on AWS, Heroku etc. (I.e. without the things in the AWS diagram he indicated like kubernetes and load balancers.)

Observation #2: I have not found WAL mode is an antidote to SQLite locks during multiple concurrent writes. (This is anecdotal)

I think regarding Go vs Python/Ruby etc. I completely get that. I would now like to check out Go on web. I use Rust for most of my software writing, but am still on Python for web servers, because there is nothing I can use for Rust that is as powerful and easy as Django.

The one place I'd push back on SQLite: if your app has any write concurrency from external processes (cron jobs, webhooks), WAL mode helps but you still hit lock contention. I have data collection scripts running every 30 minutes that write to the same DB the web app reads from. Postgres handled that cleanly from day one. Neon's free tier is 512MB with connection pooling — more than enough for a side project with real data.

Applications each have their own FreeBSD jails, so they're isolated.

ZFS incremental replication on top of regular app backups provide a quick recovery process should the hardware of that machine fail.

Moving those apps to the cloud would cost orders of magnitude more, for benefits I don't need.

100% agreed.

So yea, stick with what worked for decades if you don't see a reason not to. Also, I remember reading that StackOverflow runs on a bunch of super powerful root servers?

He's mainly talking about the tech implementation which is the easy part.

the hard part of creating a business is finding a problem valuable enough to solve and reaching the users who need that problem solved. that's where the real value is.

What do I get as an advantage being on AWS? S3 (literally like a $1 month) and SQS (free tier). Capacity if needed, just scale up t4g instances.