I am a software developer with a full time job. My salary is not enough for me rely completely on job, and I cant take the risk of leaving my job and finding another one, because I live paycheck to paycheck and dont have any savings.
Lurking through buildinpublic and here on reddit, I feel like a loser.
I am comparatively good doing full stack development ( Nodejs, React etc ). Considering my strong and weak points I came up with following projects in 2 categories.
- Build some products My strong points are: I can spend time building projects, but I dont have money to buy servers or to launch them, minimum cost considering database and all would be around $100/month ( Coming from India, this amount is huge for me, Its approx 8000/month )
- Build design templates I can spend time learning about designs since, initial investment here is low ( cost of figma, framer ) and then sell templates which can eventually help me earn sustainable amount of money, But issue is, My design skills are complete zero. For example, I get confused when I want to decide colors, or fonts.
So which path I should spend my time on ?
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Can we have a chat?
if you register a llc or a pvt ltd in india (<10000), you should be eligible for credits by most cloud providers. so if servers are the only blocker for (1), this might solve it.
You can rent server for $10 a month.
How good are you with building things? I might have a proposition for you if you are good.
Try digital ocean for server (VPS), planetscale for database (digital ocean is also good). netlify for frontend hosting.
why would it cost a $100 a month to host?
Just build it basic with nuxt/next using edge functions on vercel/netlify? Use a free supabase and you’re good.
You can even use Postgres functions as CRON handlers and call your edge functions…
You can deploy an app on Heroku with a DB for about $20 per month.
I would try to launch something as quickly as possible, because that’s the quickest way to learn. Come up with an idea, work out how quickly you can get something out (ideally less than one month), charge for it, then scale up your servers when you have people paying you.
You can put everything on a cheap server, it’s really enough for a start.
I wrote a book on deployment if you need to learn some details https://deploymentfromscratch.com
And I put together a blog post how to run all on single VPS with Kamal https://nts.strzibny.name/deploying-rails-single-server-kamal/
Good luck!
Run your own on premise server/VM using enterprise 2nd hand small form factor desktops, e.g. https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/
bro, launching has never been cheaper and easier. - railway, vercel, digitalocean etc.
Planetscale has free plan with enough limits. You dont have to spend that much on a DB
You can keep the cost low by using the following techniques (I am using both):
- Use Next.js + MongoDB + Vercel (All free tier): If your apps can be 100% serverless, this will ideally give you a bill of $0/month.
Checkout Letters. I have been running it for two years now and paid $0 till date.
- Use a cheap $5/month droplet(VM) from Digital Ocean + MongoDB: If your apps need a long running server, this way you can keep the cost fixed.
Deploy all of your apps in the same VM and use Caddy for reverse proxy.
DM me if you need help.
If you have a spare PC or laptop you can run the service on it and use ngrok for proxying to the public internet. This is the cheapest option.
You could also use zrok.io. It’s an open source alternative which can be self-hosted or has a free SaaS. It also includes cool features like ‘private sharing’ (which means both sides can be private with no inbound ports). I work on the parent project.
I’m always looking for full stack devs to work with on side projects. We have a Web3 agency and could always use a hand with some of the non web 3 stuff that comes our way. We should talk!
Are you looking for any Python devs? Can I PM?
Data eng. Do you need something?