Ask HN: What is the tech stack of your side project?
And much does it cost you to run your side project?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2023 where @spacesarebetter convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 5 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 1 comments
I have two:
https://SherlockDNA.com ↗ runs a lot of reports for genetic genealogists. It's boring a boring Rails-based app with Stimulus and Hotwire. This is plopped on a cheap $20 node from Hetzner. I use Hatchbox.io for deployment and love it. For the two, $30/month.
https://ranchoelcharro.com ↗ is a horse ranch in Mexico that rescued during COVID. The site itself lives on SquareSpace so non-technical people can edit. Behind the scenes I built out our own booking/reservation platform after being woefully dissatisfied with commercial options. It, too, is another boring Rails-based app with Stimulus and Hotwire (yes, even the widget that handles the booking is boring). Site lives on Heroku because I was too lazy to do anything else at the time, and it's fine there for now. It handles a half-dozen integrations with tour agencies, all back-office stuff, and more. It's about $50/month for everything to make it hum on Heroku which is great because I don't have to worry about it — my employees lives and their families lives depend on them getting reservations, so I want to make sure that it's as me-no-play-sysadmin as possible. SquareSpace, while annoying for a web developer like myself, is fine and runs us $33/month. All together, our tech spend is about $120/month — HelpScout for emails/tickets, emails sent with Postmark.
My side project's tech stack is NixOS, Nginx, Rust and Xeact. It's a fairly popular blog that gets hundreds of thousands of hits per month (https://xeiaso.net ↗). It's also got a hand-crafted CDN (XeDN) written in Go using net/http, tsnet and BoltDB running on fly.io.
On average it costs me $60 per month to run it in particular (Hetzner/AWS Route53/fly.io), but after ad and patreon income it actually earns me about $240 per month. I've been looking at minimizing the tech stack down some more to make it more cash-positive but moving everything on the Hetzner box to my homelab is logistically annoying. I'll get there some day.
I wrote a journaling app for myself — https://windofchange.me ↗. I’m currently the heaviest user, but there are others.
I’ve been a Haskeller for most of my career, but for this one I’m using Next.js and TypeScript for the backend and frontend.
GraphQL API (Pothos + Apollo), Postgres for the DB, DigitalOcean for the hosting.
Costs about $30/mo — hosting, managed Postgres, managed Redis. Could probably be $10/mo if I ran everything on the same droplet, but I like DO’s automated deploys and having to manage zero state by myself.
My side project is provisioning infrastructure by starting with a fresh, local VM, provisioning it with Ansible, and copying it to disk to allow it to be booted on bare metal for further use.
Packer, Terraform, Pulumi, and Docker for infrastructure.
Proxmox as the provisioned hypervisor.
HashiCorp Vault (machine facing) and Bitwarden (user/me facing) for secrets management.
Various Ansible playbooks for local orchestration and host provisioning.
Cost is one time hardware + development time. It’s amazing what tools are available for free these days.
related
700 comments on "Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34530052 ↗ last month
"Ask HN: What's the best tech stack for indie hacking?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34551770 ↗ last week