When he switches from Kubernetes in the cloud to Nginx -> App Binary -> Sqlite he trades operations functionality for cost.

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.

Lots of debate about SQLite vs Postgres. One thing to note is you can certainly run Postgres (Kubernetes even if you want) and your app for $20 / month.

I'm taking the opposite approach - managed services all the way, and my monthly infrastructure costs are higher than what's described here.

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.

The basic premise, try to be lean, is a good one. The implementation will clearly be debated with everyone having their own opinion on it but the core point is sound. I'd argue a different version of this though: keeping things lean forces simplicity and focus which is incredibly important early on. I have stepped into several startups and seen a mess of old/broken/I don't know what it does so leave it/etc etc. All of that, beyond the cost, slows you down because of the complexity. Regular gardening of your tech stack matters and has a lot of benefits.

Do these things actually work? I've seen way too many gurus on twitter claiming to make 10K+ MRR every month. And then they quietly start applying for jobs. or selling courses instead of cashing in.

Anyone doing per tenant database with SQLITE + Litestream? Please share your experiences and pain points. I know migrations are one. The other challenge is locating the correct database from incoming request. What else?

Solid writeup and impressive experience. You can try Caddy instead of nginx. Automatic HTTPS, dead-simple config, and it proxies to your Go binary in about 4 lines. If you're still manually managing Let's Encrypt certs in 2026, stop. Caddyfile for a Go backend is literally: reverse_proxy localhost:8080 — that's the whole thing.

Always good to challenge the narrative - but I don't pay for RDS Postgres because of the WAL, replication, all the beauty of pg etc. I pay RDS because it's largely set and forget. I am gladly paying AWS to think about it for me. I think at a certain scale, this is a really good tradeoff. At the very beginning it could be overkill, and at the top end obviously its unsuitable - but for most of us those tradeoffs are why it's successful.

I was writing about this recently [0]. In the 2000s, we were bragging about how cheap our services are and are getting. Today, a graduate with an idea is paying $200 amounts in AWS after the student discounts. They break the bank and go broke before they have tested the idea. Programming is literally free today.

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

The biggest cost when bootstrapping always seemed to be your salary to me, not infra costs. How long can you pay your mortgage and feed your kids off what should be your retirement or rainy day funds?