Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations
An open source bill-splitting app with only a few hundred daily visitors is spending around $115 a month on Vercel and a managed database, prompting debate over whether that stack is wildly overkill compared to a $4–$10 VPS or even a Raspberry Pi at home. Commenters contrast the convenience and “no sysadmin” appeal of serverless platforms with the predictability and dramatically lower cost of self‑hosted deployments on providers like Hetzner, OVH, or DigitalOcean. The thread also widens into a critique of how cloud pricing, developer culture, and weak user donations shape the economics and sustainability of small free web apps and open source projects.
Hosting Costs & Vercel Use
- Many are shocked that traffic (~400–1000 daily visitors, very low RPS) costs ~$115/month on Vercel.
- Consensus: this workload could run comfortably on a small VPS ($4–$10/month) or even a Raspberry Pi / old laptop, with huge capacity headroom.
- Several argue Vercel and similar PaaS are massively overpriced for small apps, with comments that this is “how they make their money.”
- A minority defend paying for convenience: not having to be a sysadmin, enjoying easy deployment, and aligning with resume/job tech stacks.
VPS, Bare Metal, and Self‑Hosting
- Multiple people report real workloads (tens of thousands to millions of requests/day) on cheap VPS or modest bare metal at a fraction of these costs.
- Hetzner, OVH, Vultr, DataPacket, and DigitalOcean are mentioned as cheaper or more powerful options.
- Some describe home‑lab setups on old laptops or Pis with Cloudflare in front, claiming sub-$50/year including power and backups.
- Others caution about DIY: security, backups, failover, burst traffic, DDoS, and multi‑region latency are nontrivial.
Databases & Architecture Choices
- Many stress that at this traffic level almost any DB (MySQL/Postgres/SQLite) on a small VPS would suffice.
- Examples include Rust + SQLite + caching handling ~200 RPS on a €13 server.
- Alternatives raised: Cloudflare D1, Supabase, Neon, SQLite+Litestream, or a self‑hosted Postgres VPS.
- Some critique modern trends: microservices, serverless, and over‑engineering driving unnecessary compute bills.
Open Source, Donations, and “Free”
- One line of discussion argues open source maintainers are undercompensated; users rarely donate, and corporations capture most value.
- Others counter that open source benefits the public and economy, and some devs willingly share work without seeking payment or obligations.
- Debate over licenses: permissive (MIT/BSD) vs. copyleft (AGPL/SSPL) as protection against corporate “freeloading.”
Product & UX Feedback
- App is praised for frictionless, account‑less flow via shared links.
- Some suggest offline/local‑first improvements and optional payment integration; others prefer it stay simple, free, and focused on cash tracking.