A place for developers to talk about building on Farcaster.

/dev

So many startups I speak to are spending $1k+ per month on servers with way less traffic. They also spent hours on DevOps which easily costs them tens of thousands in salaries.

$200 is an annoying amount to spend if you're a student / have no revenue.

But all things considered this is a tiny bill for 30k users, esp. considering he likely spent 0 time/money on DevOps other than this bill because Vercel makes things so easy.

Plus his site didn't crash because Vercel scales automatically.

Obviously, you can get cheaper prices (esp. if you don't value your time), as Vercel charges a markup. And that might be the best thing for him. Spending $2.5k per year on servers is tough when getting started.

POV: ur on ur way to school and see ur @vercel monthly bill…

$200 😱😱🤯🤯

For context: one of my free apps (text-behind-image) has 30K users this month

Seriously considering the self hosting option rn… tf do I do rn https://t.co/RcQxmKH1HA

Rexan Wong

So many startups I speak to are spending $1k+ per month on servers with way less traffic. They also spent hours on DevOps which easily costs them tens of thousands in salaries.

$200 is an annoying amount to spend if you're a student / have no revenue.

But all things considered this is a tiny bill for 30k users, esp. considering he likely spent 0 time/money on DevOps other than this bill because Vercel makes things so easy.

Plus his site didn't crash because Vercel scales automatically.

Obviously, you can get cheaper prices (esp. if you don't value your time), as Vercel charges a markup. And that might be the best thing for him. Spending $2.5k per year on servers is tough when getting started.

https://x.com/rexan_wong/status/1855760594403799132

Great breakdown from Theo where a lot of the "unexpected" costs of Vercel come from. https://youtu.be/jsuNjCAngnQ Unsurprisingly its CDN and bandwidth from assets and serverless execution with needless awaiting.

Building getinboxzero.com and sharemint.xyz.

I also run a YouTube channel, "Learn from Open Source": youtube.com/elie2222 

Bill estimations meaning estimating how many hours you need to spend on DevOps? Or how many gb hrs you’re going to use?
It’s hard to know either before you start a project.

There’s a lot of stuff to learn. He could spend the time on DevOps or other areas. I personally would rank DevOps fairly low down when there are easy solutions like Vercel or Render that solve it. Learn these things when you need them.

Pricing aside, he'll learn a lot more going self-hosted route. Vercel is great when it's your deliberate choice and you ran some bill estimations.

+1, Vercel is expensive and that's a good debate to have, but "surprise bills" are not a valid criticism.