Ask HN: The simplest way to startup any fullstack application for near 0 cost?

Hey people,

the last few weeks I tried getting a small boilerplate going for running fullstack applications for almost free using free tiers of several services (CircleCI, AWS Lambda, etc) and to enable development focused only on the code. Honestly it should have just been inserting a few secrets into the build tool (or commit it, private repos are free and who cares) and being up to speed but that didn't really work out.

I realized that running non-lambda languages is a problem where I usually would have went with Zeit Now's Serverless Docker, but that seems a non option and the best way I'd do it if I was willing to spend money was a AWS Fargate Terraform file but, not everyone can (and wants) to use that for simple prototyping.

So my question to you all is: How would you architect an infrastructure to enable quick prototyping for nearly no cost? The nearly no cost is important for me as I know a lot of developers who can't even afford the 5$ it costs f.e. to run a AWS EC2 instance and aren't even versed with it.

Working locally is always nice obviously but there are waaaaay too many tutorials that speak of "production ready" and are "ssh into vps, git pull and docker run" at best.

2 comments

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5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 6y ago ↗

Used "even" twice in the same sentence but instead should have elaborated more on what I mean with "not versed" with it at the end of the second last paragraph.

PoV from me: If you are versed enough to quickly provision your infrastructure within a single VPS (or what it takes you) you are already good enough and should get paid a developer salary that spending 50 bucks a month for a managed service won't kill you or 10 bucks if you are doing more of the work yourself (which is learning too! But not the goal of this).

btown 6y ago ↗

This isn't necessarily true for a lot of parts of the world. Talented developers benefit from live hosted apps to be able to stand out in the job market, but they may not make enough to host themselves. AWS and GCE should ideally make it easier for them to do `git push aws master`, but I imagine they've decided that the free tier should be for people who actually want to play with infrastructure (e.g. employees at large non-cloud orgs), and that people uninterested in that aren't worth them providing even the free tier for free. I don't think that's the right call, but it's not an inconsistent one.