Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

The cloud has made people forget how far you can get with a single machine.

Hosting staging envs in pricey cloud envs seems crazy to me but I understand why you would want to because modern clouds can have a lot of moving parts.

The cloud has made people afraid of linux servers. The markup is essentially just the price business has to pay because of developer insecurity. The irony is that self hosting is relatively simple, and alot of fun. Personally never got the appeal of Heroku, Vercel and similar, because theres nothing better than spinning up a server and setting it up from scratch. Every developer should try it.

Honestly I think it's the database that makes devs insecure. The stakes are high and you usually want PITR and regular backups even for low traffic apps. Having a "simple" turnkey service for this that can run in any environment (dedicated, VPS, colo, etc.) would be huge.

I think this is partly responsible for the increased popularity of sqlite as a backend. It's super simple and lightstream for recovery isn't that complicated.

Most apps don't need 5 9s, but they do care about losing data. Eliminate the possibility of losing data, without paying tons of $ to also eliminate potential outages, and you'll get a lot of customers.