Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

I'm always curious what folks use for their database for things like this. Even though I like SQLite--a lot--my preference has become that the app is generally separate and mostly stateless. Almost always the data is the most important thing, so I like being able to expand/replace/trash the app infra at will with no worries.

Thought about maybe running a Postgres VPS, but I've enjoyed using neon.tech more than I expected (esp. the GUI and branching). I guess the thing that has crept in: speed/ease is really beating out my ingrained cheapness as I've gotten older and have less time. A SaaS DB has sped things up. Still don't like the monthly bills & variability though.

>Almost always the data is the most important thing, so I like being able to expand/replace/trash the app infra at will with no worries.

Have you used SQLite with Litestream? That's the beauty of it. You can blow away the app and deploy it somewhere else, and Litestream will just pull down your data and continue along as if nothing happened.

At the top of this post, I show a demo of attaching Litestream to my app, and then blowing away my Heroku instance and redeploying a clean instance on Fly.io, and Litestream ports all the data along with the new deployment:

https://mtlynch.io/litestream/