How I'm cutting down my infra costs by 80%
I'm cutting my monthly costs by more than 80% by self-hosting everything
I started indiehacking a year ago & was using mostly free services for my projects:
- Vercel
- Supabase
- PostHog analytics
- AWS EC2 first year free for micro instance
But over the last year, my projects have finally started getting some more traffic + my free credits on AWS ran out. I am looking to scale even more so I know costs can get out of hand pretty quickly (+ I have seen some scary stories here recently).
Monthly, I would have, on average:
- $50 for Supabase (5+ projects)
- $45 for my AWS EC2 instances
- variable costs for renting GPU for my AI projects
- I also just surpassed the limits of the free plan on Vercel in terms of bandwidth, Image Optimization & Speed Insight points
The only project that's (finally) making some money so far is ImagenMIA, and with only 60% margins or so due to high model training costs (+ still early phase).
On the one hand I am super happy that ImagenMIA is starting to generate some money on its own (all organic, SEO-based traffic) but on the other hand, infra costs are starting to climb up and are only going to get worse as it scales.
Luckily I saw a post on Twitter mentioning Hetzner and Coolify. So I started digging into it and have migrated the first couple of projects to test everything out.
Here is my setup:
- One small VPS (€3.98) for Coolify
- 2vCPU
- 4GB RAM
- 40GB SSD
- 20 TB Egress traffic
A bigger one (€14.51) to host all my projects:
- 8 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 160 GB SSD
- 20 TB Egress traffic
I will be self hosting everything:
- Supabase
- Front-end
- NodeJS Express API Endpoints
- N8N
- PostHog
I was a bit afraid but tbh, Coolify makes things so much easier (OS alternative to Vercel/Netlify) + now I no longer have to worry about extreme bandwidth costs in case of traffic spikes!
Very happy I built all my projects around OS software. This is what's allowing me to just self-host everything instead of being stuck & having to pay. Looking to migrate my bigger projects over there hopefully the next couple of days!
