Serverless Revolution
This post is not sponsored by Cloudflare or any PaaS provider I will mention here. I just want to help any developer that has a project in mind bring that project to the real world without spending a single penny.
The Solo Engineer's Life
I'm Rolando Andrade, a Software Engineer with an extensive experience in many areas of the Software development lifecycle. In August of the last year, I decided to start developing my own projects to make the difference by myself, creating many Apps and collaborating in many consulting sessions.
When you work at a big company, costs are something that you are not worried about, usually you ask to your manager and if everything is correct, you get what you want. But when I started working on my own projects, I discovered that infrastructure is not easy and cheap, it does not matter you have all the scripts and templates, you eventually will have to make changes, optimize costs, and a lot of pretty boring stuff.
I am just a Software Engineer, let me create my software in peace without give me a 10 pricing tiers depending of dozens of constraints. Yes, I'm talking about you Amazon.
Running on the Edge
I deployed applications on AWS, GCP, and Azure. If I have to chose my favorite of them, I would select Azure, just because I felt their product more engineer-user-friendly. But they are almost the same thing. Do one hundred steps to deploy an application and pay a lot of money for it.
But after several projects, when I was developing StepCode by the end of last year I discovered the free tier of Cloudflare and everything has changed.
On Cloudflare pages I deployed StepCode, 2k monthly visits, an awesome speed, an enhanced security, and deployments on a push in a GitHub branch. Everything for free. I was in love and starting testing everything else from Cloudflare and similar companies.
Rolando Andrade
Cloudflare workers permits almost everything, I have deployed some serverless APIs made with Hono there. The package next-on-pages, allows to deploy NextJS applications on Cloudflare with just a push on a git branch or running a single command. And even with AI workers you can have an LLM giving 500 daily responses for free, that is awesome for MVPs and hobby products.
Ok, you can deploy pages and APIs, but you need a database, right? Yep, it is correct, and here Cloudflare also has D1 that I have been using the last month with no problems so far. Other alternative could be using something like Turso or Supabase that are amazing too. And if storage is something that matters R2 from Cloudflare I feel it as good as S3 from Amazon for initial projects.
You can Run Whatever You Want for Free
Start your project, change the world, don't worry about costs, you can reach 10k, 50k, 100k users without a single dollar. And if you exceed the limits, just pay $5. If I have to choose a platform, I would start with:
- Frontend hosting: Vercel / Cloudflare pages. $0/month
- Backend hosting: Deploy an API on the edge with CF workers. $0/month
- Database: D1, Turso, Supabase, Convex. $0/month
- Real time collaboration: Party kit. $0/month
- Key-Value fast storage like Redis: Cloudflare KV. $0/month
- Blob storage: Cloudflare R2 and even S3. $0/month
- Security: Cloudflare. $0/month
- Authentication: Clerk, Supabase. $0/month
- AI: AI workers $0/month
- Monitoring: Cloudflare $0/month
- Domain: Namecheap, Cloudflare, etc. $12/year
This list is not extensive and is based on my experience. If you know better alternatives let me know and I will update this list.
The Bottom Line
There are no excuses. You can scale your side project from 0 to 10k users without swapping the credit card and with a quality of a top tier product. Just design it, code it, and deploy it. Thank me later.
If you enjoy the content, please don't hesitate to subscribe and leave a comment! I would love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the topics I cover. Your feedback is greatly appreciated! Leave a tip.