As a solo dev, I use $5 VPS on OVH or Hetzner for peace of mind. I remember trying out GCP for some simple html or django thing a decade ago and it cost me $30/mo or something and I said nah. I've also seen an ex-coworker rack up $50k with no recourse. I've already read enough horror stories like this.
Also don't outsource your thinking to LLMs, it's a useful tool, but once you do, it's brainrot for programmers.
Some honest, maybe hard to hear feedback: as a solo developer with no customers and no traffic you probably shouldn’t be doing anything with cloud services. Cloud providers have many scalable services that mostly come down to them being paid by traffic costs or CPU/RAM costs and they don’t care what you’re doing, if you have 0 customers or 1000, if its “dev” or “production” - its all production to them.
I’ve seen runaway cloud costs at my employer a few times, with a few different services and it took a fair amount of time to figure out the monitoring/alerting. They may change their service agreements or pricing structure in hard to decipher ToS, etc. If the cloud provider won’t refund or credit a company that has a representative, they aren’t going to pay any attention to a solo dev or small team.
I would build locally on your laptop and start with a $5/month VM until you get a paying customer and know what size your system needs.
Most hobby and small business sites can easily run on a $5-10/mo VPS. If you need a bit more, hetzner server auctions should suffice. It's always safer to use a fixed cost service, instead of the cloud hosts that don't let you set a hard quota on spend.
It's a bit like when I needed ChatGPT to help me revise an article yesterday, and it automatically toned down the harsh criticisms I had written about ChatGPT in the article. Asking Gemini how to save money on Google Cloud would likely yield similar results.
I understand the "everybody does it that way" aspect of the cloud, but the old way of subscribing to a dynamic DNS and hosting locally still works just fine and you have full control of things.
Later, once you have more traffic and/or paying customers, it would be worth looking into cloud hosting. And even then, you probably don't need as much horsepower as they're trying to sell.
First of all, thank you so much for obviously writing part of this via a Large Language Model. Second of all, what kind of argument is "The commit message claimed '60% cost savings'" - do you have any idea what you were actually doing? And lastly, addressing your question:
> Do you set hard budget caps and accept downtime?
If you have no clue what you're doing, yes! Especially for early prototyping, why not? IaaS offerings will also just create downtime for you as well if you need more resources than you've provisioned. It's normal. Either you set up a system where you can rely on dynamic scaling or you don't and set hard limits.
You asked your cloud provider to provision resources, and you were billed for them. If you can't handle working with a cloud provider, you might want to look into less scalable but in turn more cost stable infrastructure solutions.
Appreciate the directness, and fair point. That’s exactly what I find confusing about their setup and why I’m here trying to learn.
A little more context: I’ve been on GCP for 4 years, App Engine for the majority of it. Expensive but stable. I’ve used Gemini in the past to reduce costs successfully, so this wasn’t my first attempt at optimizing.
I take ownership of the outcome, but the config behavior still doesn’t match my mental model and Google support hasn’t been able to clarify how to properly scope this either, which is why I turned here.
> the config behavior still doesn’t match my mental model
Could you -learn- how to self-host a version of your app to expand your mental model in doing so? You outsourced the thinking part to an LLM - a bag of words - and are surprised the outcome didn't just work?
> Google support hasn’t been able to clarify how to properly scope this either
More outsourcing of thinking, no? Is Plan A really asking the vendor selling you compute how to use less compute and make them less money, instead of figuring out how to use just enough of it yourself?
If you're taking ownership, who could have effected the outcome the most here? Maybe the person who keeps outsourcing thinking to LLMs, support requests, and forums? I'd argue ownership would look more like figuring out how to handle Top Cost #1 yourself and reduce burn rate, starting by doing less outsourcing.
I don't understand why any solo dev would use aws. Its awfully priced and 99% of people can just use a vps and that should be enough. By the time you blow up and need cloud scale you can afford it.
I am all in on cloud, AWS specifically. I have been doing AWS consulting for five years.
But if I were doing a side project or starting a business, I would personally use a simple VPS. In my case I would use AWS Lightsail - it’s a simple fixed priced service with no surprises.
I’m not saying you should use AWS. But you definitely shouldn’t be taking advice from a chatbot when you don’t know what you’re doing.
I self host. I also have no paying customers and negligible compute needs. It's free minus the power cost which is, again, negligible. If it was on docker on my main computer instead of 18 year old junk, it would probably be even less.
> Is App Engine still preferable purely for cost predictability?
How is Cloud Run cost not predictable?
It is fairly simple arithmetic in a spreadsheet to estimate the upper bound with # of max instance times the unit prices times the per-instance resources. Exactly the same as you do with App Engine standard & flexible environment.
> budget caps
Doesn’t exist in GCP and most cloud providers. You can fix the usage or hard cap the usage autoscaling, but not the spend incurred by the usage.
> What guardrails work that don’t depend on constant manual billing checks?
Start conservatively with max instances and instance resource, and iterate based on the actual performance and needs. Say, you know, put the number 1 in everything.
Do your capacity planning and cost estimation and understand them. “Solo dev” or not, you need these things to run the business. The root cause was that you outsourced your business and budgeting decision to LLM without verifying it and understanding it.
> I’d appreciate hearing what others would do differently.
the answer is staring you right in the face:
> I fed my setup, budget, and constraints as context into Gemini CLI
> The commit message claimed “60% cost savings.”
don't outsource your critical thinking to a chatbot.
or, if you feel you simply must have the chatbot do this work for you, supervise it more closely. instead you ignored it for 6 weeks:
> From Nov 2 to Dec 14, Cloud Run accrued ~$4,676.
Multiplying complexity by nondeterminism. AI is going to democratize the way people don't know what they're doing.
As a solo dev, I use $5 VPS on OVH or Hetzner for peace of mind. I remember trying out GCP for some simple html or django thing a decade ago and it cost me $30/mo or something and I said nah. I've also seen an ex-coworker rack up $50k with no recourse. I've already read enough horror stories like this.
Also don't outsource your thinking to LLMs, it's a useful tool, but once you do, it's brainrot for programmers.
Some honest, maybe hard to hear feedback: as a solo developer with no customers and no traffic you probably shouldn’t be doing anything with cloud services. Cloud providers have many scalable services that mostly come down to them being paid by traffic costs or CPU/RAM costs and they don’t care what you’re doing, if you have 0 customers or 1000, if its “dev” or “production” - its all production to them.
I’ve seen runaway cloud costs at my employer a few times, with a few different services and it took a fair amount of time to figure out the monitoring/alerting. They may change their service agreements or pricing structure in hard to decipher ToS, etc. If the cloud provider won’t refund or credit a company that has a representative, they aren’t going to pay any attention to a solo dev or small team.
I would build locally on your laptop and start with a $5/month VM until you get a paying customer and know what size your system needs.
Most hobby and small business sites can easily run on a $5-10/mo VPS. If you need a bit more, hetzner server auctions should suffice. It's always safer to use a fixed cost service, instead of the cloud hosts that don't let you set a hard quota on spend.
You just did what some chatbot told you to do? One provided by the people whose profits you were trying to minimize?
I wouldn’t have expected that to go well.
It's a bit like when I needed ChatGPT to help me revise an article yesterday, and it automatically toned down the harsh criticisms I had written about ChatGPT in the article. Asking Gemini how to save money on Google Cloud would likely yield similar results.
I understand the "everybody does it that way" aspect of the cloud, but the old way of subscribing to a dynamic DNS and hosting locally still works just fine and you have full control of things.
Later, once you have more traffic and/or paying customers, it would be worth looking into cloud hosting. And even then, you probably don't need as much horsepower as they're trying to sell.
With all due respect, what?
First of all, thank you so much for obviously writing part of this via a Large Language Model. Second of all, what kind of argument is "The commit message claimed '60% cost savings'" - do you have any idea what you were actually doing? And lastly, addressing your question:
> Do you set hard budget caps and accept downtime?
If you have no clue what you're doing, yes! Especially for early prototyping, why not? IaaS offerings will also just create downtime for you as well if you need more resources than you've provisioned. It's normal. Either you set up a system where you can rely on dynamic scaling or you don't and set hard limits.
You asked your cloud provider to provision resources, and you were billed for them. If you can't handle working with a cloud provider, you might want to look into less scalable but in turn more cost stable infrastructure solutions.
Appreciate the directness, and fair point. That’s exactly what I find confusing about their setup and why I’m here trying to learn.
A little more context: I’ve been on GCP for 4 years, App Engine for the majority of it. Expensive but stable. I’ve used Gemini in the past to reduce costs successfully, so this wasn’t my first attempt at optimizing.
I take ownership of the outcome, but the config behavior still doesn’t match my mental model and Google support hasn’t been able to clarify how to properly scope this either, which is why I turned here.
> the config behavior still doesn’t match my mental model
Could you -learn- how to self-host a version of your app to expand your mental model in doing so? You outsourced the thinking part to an LLM - a bag of words - and are surprised the outcome didn't just work?
> Google support hasn’t been able to clarify how to properly scope this either
More outsourcing of thinking, no? Is Plan A really asking the vendor selling you compute how to use less compute and make them less money, instead of figuring out how to use just enough of it yourself?
If you're taking ownership, who could have effected the outcome the most here? Maybe the person who keeps outsourcing thinking to LLMs, support requests, and forums? I'd argue ownership would look more like figuring out how to handle Top Cost #1 yourself and reduce burn rate, starting by doing less outsourcing.
I don't understand why any solo dev would use aws. Its awfully priced and 99% of people can just use a vps and that should be enough. By the time you blow up and need cloud scale you can afford it.
I am all in on cloud, AWS specifically. I have been doing AWS consulting for five years.
But if I were doing a side project or starting a business, I would personally use a simple VPS. In my case I would use AWS Lightsail - it’s a simple fixed priced service with no surprises.
I’m not saying you should use AWS. But you definitely shouldn’t be taking advice from a chatbot when you don’t know what you’re doing.
I self host. I also have no paying customers and negligible compute needs. It's free minus the power cost which is, again, negligible. If it was on docker on my main computer instead of 18 year old junk, it would probably be even less.
Wait you’re still paying $5 per day on an idle service?
That’s absurd.
I know, right? I solo a small business (6 figures revenue) off a static site and backend on $1/month VPS.
$0 revenue, 0 customers, and thinks $5/day is acceptable. LOL.
> Is App Engine still preferable purely for cost predictability?
How is Cloud Run cost not predictable?
It is fairly simple arithmetic in a spreadsheet to estimate the upper bound with # of max instance times the unit prices times the per-instance resources. Exactly the same as you do with App Engine standard & flexible environment.
> budget caps
Doesn’t exist in GCP and most cloud providers. You can fix the usage or hard cap the usage autoscaling, but not the spend incurred by the usage.
> What guardrails work that don’t depend on constant manual billing checks?
Start conservatively with max instances and instance resource, and iterate based on the actual performance and needs. Say, you know, put the number 1 in everything.
Do your capacity planning and cost estimation and understand them. “Solo dev” or not, you need these things to run the business. The root cause was that you outsourced your business and budgeting decision to LLM without verifying it and understanding it.
I like using VMs for their predictable pricing. And docker-compose is easy enough to iterate with.
Any favorite providers?
Hetzner
Hetzner
Stories like this scare me and why I stick to PAAS.
Isn't Google Cloud Run a PAAS?