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

I don't mean to hate but i find it incredibly alarming that i'm lately seeing all the seemingly seniorly positioned people writing articles about how they just realized that you can actually just buy a vps, setup a deployment workflow and write a revealing blog about "drastically cutting costs".

It's like juniors who did not recieve a proper training/education got hired into companies where someone told them to go serverless on some heroku or vercel, or use some incredibly expensive aws service because that's a "modern correct way" to do it, except now they were a developer for long enough to get a "senior" title in their job title now are in positions of actually modelling this architecture themselves

As one of those people who's experiencing this now (I'm a person who's worked in this industry for 25 years and done everything from colocated servers, to VMs, to VPS's, to AWS/GCP, and now going back to VPS/dedicated), I can tell you it's more of a boiling frog situation. The number of servers slowly grows over time and before you know it, you're spending way more than you really thought about.

At a certain scale (or when you do more custom dev), you just don't prioritize it because it's a blip in your financials compared to salaries. And it's not worth spending what might be thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars of engineering and testing effort to migrate off, when there are other priorities.

And one day you (in our case) realize that you're spending $600/month between Linode/AWS/Fly/Render (cuz we experimented a lot), claude code can help you with some of the stuff, and you want to consolidate it all back to the olden days where you just had 2-3 servers paying a total of $60-75 a month . But you still have to set aside probably a day or two to do it (no longer a couple sprints). So then the math works out where we make that money back within a few months.

So that's where I am at the moment.