I watched the material UI playlist way back when. It's great to see someone who isn't optimizing for being a youtube tutorial guru. Nothing better than learning from someone who is actually applying it to solve real world issues. Very cool!
Wow throwback haha - really appreciate the kind words man. Yeah I kinda got burnt out making tutorials, and it didn't fit in with what I was doing on a daily basis anyways... so I figured I'd try this instead hahaha.
I run a 160k daily visitors LMS (it has a lot of free stuff), about 5k registered users for just 46 bucks with a vultr vps + 10 ddos protection. I only need to worry with bandwidth usage, because I have a 5tb cap and after that I have to pay 0.01 per GB, which I've only been close to the limit once (97% at it's peak). Developer cost and producing content are by far the most expensive costs.
I'd like to know why staying away from AWS... Sure there are cheaper solutions than AWS, but I don't think it's horrible or that confusing/complicated.
That's a lot of vendors to depend on. I run 3 sites and my total is less than $30. Can be really rough to depend on metered services. Billing spikes are rough, especially when you are pre-revenue. Thanks for sharing the Vercel experience.
Hmmm idk about the general "Stay clear of AWS". Yes it is very quick and easy to accidentally spend tons of money, but with the right things you can manage to not spend much. Vercel is also just reselling AWS stuff so thats where you pay a bunch of premium too. Serverless scaling is a pain once you reach the point where instances of containers would be cheaper than serverless calls. I wouldnt recommend any completely new engineer to do anything on AWS. I remember the first times i had to do stuff and i was close to causing problems every time. Now after 3-4 years im pretty comfortable with using aws. It requires training and attention when you do stuff and plan architectures.
i've been thinking about starting a startup, this was really eyeopening both in terms of expected cost but also what it takes (or what is good to have) stack wise! liked and subbed!!
I know there is some complexity behind your SAAS but a single server (eg 48 CPU cores) can easily handle 100x times your monthly traffic (you said 500k page views). With the remaining computing power you could probably handle the background computations as well and get it all running for much cheaper overall. I understand the convenience of using all these services and abstractions but beware it easily backfires as you spend time configuring and troubleshooting these instead
Yeah I am not touching vercel. I am scared of it. What is going on with aws? Have you tried SST to deploy on AWS? My next stack will be pretty simple NextJS, payload CMS, serverless functions for cron jobs and event bus all the way( they run for almost free) and SST will hold all of that together.
Hey, I have a question about login and sign-up. I’m planning to use AWS Cognito since I’m not very experienced in that area. Is it possible to use both AWS Cognito and another solution together?
I assume you initial app was working like AWS based using it's features, but did you try to compare those costs with other cloud hosting, like GCP, Azure (for example)? I know you say, when the AWS costs were getting high, you moved to parts of this features to separate services (heroku, betterstack,...) but did you evaluate the possibility to move to a different hosting as a bundle?
could you also please share the employee cost with a breakdown for the number of employees you have working for each startup, like x engineers, y designers and z growth marketers, etc
Thanks for sharing your startups' finances like this! I noticed there are only tech stack costs on here; I find that a lot of my costs end up going towards marketing (although maybe that is just a signal that I am doing something wrong). Would you consider making a video on this subject?
You mentioned you have about 4 year's worth of data on all matches on your first SaaS, can you disclose how much TB that is approximately in your AWS db? I'm currently on AWS S3 for the storage of sound recordings, im curious how that would scale approximately
Vercel is great if youre publishing projects with virtually no users but once you get over even like 100 concurrent active users its very easy to ecceed their limits. AWS imo just targets growing companies with tons of capital. I'd recommend just renting vps/vdses, they have their own risks of course like reliability, etc. but the prices are way more affordable. Plus learning devops to me is fun + a free skill for your resume.
@@AnthonySistilli Thanks a lot for the response! I am working with the Basic Display API although it is quite restrictive, I'm assuming you are using the Graph API?
what are good alternatives for aws? you mentioned to stay away from it... so what should we use instead? also, any examples why specifically it was hard to work with? just asking because i'm trying to start something of my own :)
Hi andy, can you please suggest me some gumroad alternative that provides subscriptiom methods integration with rest api and has payouts for payoneer or direct bank account? My country does not have paypal or stripe.
Personally as long as it all works fine, I'd take Cloudflare over vercel any day - as long as you disable proxying and let vercel do things like Image caching it should be okay!
You don't. Back in the days you would do these things on your own. A SaaS is there to make your life faster, easier etc... would you rather pay 50$ a month or spend $10k doing it yourslef with medicore solutions?
Yeah that's the point, if you know how to make these saas software as per your requirement it's can get even cheaper and more reliable, scalable.@@aurelianspodarec2629
Best Info I've Run Into So Far! I've been mulling over 2 startup concepts and been brickWalled with all the puzzle pieces and cost$! Sub'd & 👍Liked! Can you do a vid on OpenSaaS? Love your Content! Keep it Going!
So you went from 6-700 usd/m on aws to 600 usd/m spread over 7 services whereof at least a few will massively overcharge regularly... sounds... not like a win?
Do not rely on cloudflare. Only use the services that can be easily replaced and always be ready to move to another provider. Because when cloudflare decides to fuck you over its game over. And just in general its a really bad advise to lock yourself in a specific ecosystem. You can do it if you think its the right decision, but suggesting it to others is stupid. A "Senior" Dev should know better.
Also for 600USD you could get a whole fleet of dedicated servers and deploy there. Maybe get an external caching service and obv. a DNS provider and youre good to go. 100% no hidden fees and most likely way more performant. I dont know the cost of dedicated servers in the US but here in Germany 600USD would get you 1.8TB of RAM and 112 CPU Cores across 14 Nodes.
Yeah! You can check out my tech stack video on what I currently use - but for domain buying you can use CF, hosting node applications you can use heroku, hosting React / nextjs you can use vercel, CICD you can use Gitlab
Hasn't been much of an issue! They only connect to eachother via our DB so it's the latency that you'd naturally have from frontend/backend supabase, which is quite low.
Great video, thanks for answering my question in previous video about making this kind of topic! Do you have a video about cloudflare? How to install it correctly, what is does and so on? I have heard a lot about cloudflare, but never understood it correctly. Thanks!
This is a great video. I just found your channel, but this gold. I don't know if I missed it, but would you tell how many customers you serve with that costs or how many visits your apps get a month, mostly to estimate the cost per user (paid or not) or cost per number of hits a month?
Guys I am confused. I simply need a landing page, a page where the user can use my program after log in and my program connected with my program which runs in the cloud. Do you have any suggestions which offers all this on one platform?
I haven’t come across an all-in-one solution but you should look at firebase if you’re new. Lets you handle authentication, database, Google functions can trigger on requests (your program) it’s all serverless so no need to worry about any of that stuff either! Gl!
AWS has hidden costs everywhere, and was a nightmare to maintain and debug. Our pipelines on AWS were 20mins + to deploy, when I moved to vercel, they were 1 minute or less. AWS has more customization but overall is suuuuper bulky and ridden with hidden costs.
So no cost related to branding, registering as and LLC or Corp or any of the long list of little things you need for your business to be registered and legitimate? Just $100/month? I'm sorry I'm pretty shocked here. I'm all ears if someone wants to explain but this just sounds way too good to be true.
There’s such an insane glut of SaaS offerings now that don’t need to exist. It’s basically shovelware. The money is in selling the tools to the witless prospectors.
No Heroku, cuz, support is BAD in my experience, they shut down my application for days without a legit reason, luckily that was a PoC application. AWS is bit of expensive however, by far the best support team, most fast, reliable DB, less latency, RDS ever I see.
Love the content homie. Good blend of tech and business, which isn’t something you find a lot of. Keep em coming man!
Thank you bro!! Anything in particular you'd like me to talk about? :)
Thanks it’s really insightful. Vercel lost a potential customer today - will steer clear of them unless they change their ways
I watched the material UI playlist way back when. It's great to see someone who isn't optimizing for being a youtube tutorial guru. Nothing better than learning from someone who is actually applying it to solve real world issues. Very cool!
Wow throwback haha - really appreciate the kind words man. Yeah I kinda got burnt out making tutorials, and it didn't fit in with what I was doing on a daily basis anyways... so I figured I'd try this instead hahaha.
Positive guy in tech & biz.
Relevant content too. Keep such videos coming 😀
Appreciate you man!
User paying a SaaS paying a PaaS
lool
thats how it works lol and PaaS will pay a IaaS if its platform is remote
And the laas is paying the tax@@rajshah2130
Paying AWS.
I run a 160k daily visitors LMS (it has a lot of free stuff), about 5k registered users for just 46 bucks with a vultr vps + 10 ddos protection. I only need to worry with bandwidth usage, because I have a 5tb cap and after that I have to pay 0.01 per GB, which I've only been close to the limit once (97% at it's peak). Developer cost and producing content are by far the most expensive costs.
agree
Which privider you pau 0.01 per GB?
Vultr vps
Stay away from AWS. …we’re using Vercel, an AWS wrapper. 😄
hahaha wrappers are useful for a reason
Heroku is an AWS wrapper too 😂
This video quickly became “the cost of not knowing AWS”
@@Vorenus875but the wrappers are cheaper when the site is not that big
🤣
I'd like to know why staying away from AWS... Sure there are cheaper solutions than AWS, but I don't think it's horrible or that confusing/complicated.
You’re content is so valuable!
Glad it helps!!
That's a lot of vendors to depend on. I run 3 sites and my total is less than $30.
Can be really rough to depend on metered services. Billing spikes are rough, especially when you are pre-revenue. Thanks for sharing the Vercel experience.
Great insights man thank you!! 3 sites for $30 is really awesome
what's your monthly income
that part on vercel hits hard damn
Haha, Vercel is great until it isn't
Thank you for your transparency. Even though it's my first time seeing your channel and website, I've learnt a lot from this video =)
nice video man, enjoying this content
Glad it's useful!
dude you're so fucking brilliant, you saas ideas are VERY good! I just got so many ideas from this!
how are you scraping instagram tho? can you make an in depth video on how you run continuous scraping and how you host it?
Been using DNSimple for years. $6/mo personal plan with free DDoS protection out of the box. No additional setting changes required.
this content is pure gold. Great work Anthony 👏
Glad it's valuable to you man!! I'll keep it up :)
Hmmm idk about the general "Stay clear of AWS". Yes it is very quick and easy to accidentally spend tons of money, but with the right things you can manage to not spend much.
Vercel is also just reselling AWS stuff so thats where you pay a bunch of premium too. Serverless scaling is a pain once you reach the point where instances of containers would be cheaper than serverless calls.
I wouldnt recommend any completely new engineer to do anything on AWS. I remember the first times i had to do stuff and i was close to causing problems every time. Now after 3-4 years im pretty comfortable with using aws. It requires training and attention when you do stuff and plan architectures.
i've been thinking about starting a startup, this was really eyeopening both in terms of expected cost but also what it takes (or what is good to have) stack wise!
liked and subbed!!
Great vids, and the insta reels are top tier
Hey man! I love your startup content. Thanks!
Thank you!!
I know there is some complexity behind your SAAS but a single server (eg 48 CPU cores) can easily handle 100x times your monthly traffic (you said 500k page views). With the remaining computing power you could probably handle the background computations as well and get it all running for much cheaper overall. I understand the convenience of using all these services and abstractions but beware it easily backfires as you spend time configuring and troubleshooting these instead
Nice to see someone who actually does this for real
Betterstack also has uptime monitoring, or does Uptime Bot have more features?
Yeah I am not touching vercel. I am scared of it. What is going on with aws? Have you tried SST to deploy on AWS? My next stack will be pretty simple NextJS, payload CMS, serverless functions for cron jobs and event bus all the way( they run for almost free) and SST will hold all of that together.
AWS problems sounded like skill issues
Do you still feel the same about Cloud Flare in light of new events?
Hey, I have a question about login and sign-up. I’m planning to use AWS Cognito since I’m not very experienced in that area. Is it possible to use both AWS Cognito and another solution together?
What happened to that Magik influencer startup? I tried to go on the website and it's just an error. Why did you give up on it?
Hi! Why not a dedicated server with CD/CI + Cloudflare? It's not better and cheaper? (When you already configure it)
I assume you initial app was working like AWS based using it's features, but did you try to compare those costs with other cloud hosting, like GCP, Azure (for example)?
I know you say, when the AWS costs were getting high, you moved to parts of this features to separate services (heroku, betterstack,...) but did you evaluate the possibility to move to a different hosting as a bundle?
Nope! I think the silod applications like heroku, render, supabase, etc actually add so much QoL that I'd never move back to a full AWS setting.
wait is that the backend for vlr? I had no idea you made that
Vercel and Cloudflare not looking good today.
could you also please share the employee cost with a breakdown for the number of employees you have working for each startup, like x engineers, y designers and z growth marketers, etc
Great question!! I will cover this for sure!
@@AnthonySistilli awesome, looking forward to it
Thanks for sharing your startups' finances like this! I noticed there are only tech stack costs on here; I find that a lot of my costs end up going towards marketing (although maybe that is just a signal that I am doing something wrong). Would you consider making a video on this subject?
Ah personally we had a $0 marketing policy! If the product was good it would spread through word of mouth usually
Great content ❤ new subscriber
Welcome!!
Great video and transparancy! Thanks for sharing this!!
Appreciate you!
At this scale, you could just buy a dedicated server in a datacenter
What would you recommend for a SAAS developed in a Django framework? AWS or Heroku? Have heard from others also regarding AWS's hidden costs. 😷
heroku usually is fine, easy to get started, low cost - I think with SaaS's speed is key, and AWS has a large learning curve
You mentioned you have about 4 year's worth of data on all matches on your first SaaS, can you disclose how much TB that is approximately in your AWS db? I'm currently on AWS S3 for the storage of sound recordings, im curious how that would scale approximately
Why move away from betterstack if you're so happy with them?
Super interesting thank you
Appreciate you!!
An enlightening and fresh perspective. Thanks!
Glad it was helpful!
Thank you for this one, been thinking about these exactly same questions what you presented in video. Espectially cloudflare + vercel anti ddos etc.
Glad it was helpful!
Vercel is great if youre publishing projects with virtually no users but once you get over even like 100 concurrent active users its very easy to ecceed their limits.
AWS imo just targets growing companies with tons of capital.
I'd recommend just renting vps/vdses, they have their own risks of course like reliability, etc. but the prices are way more affordable. Plus learning devops to me is fun + a free skill for your resume.
Great video man! Btw how are you getting your Instagram data via API or scraping?
Fully API!
@@AnthonySistilli Thanks a lot for the response! I am working with the Basic Display API although it is quite restrictive, I'm assuming you are using the Graph API?
Liked becuase of Jared.
Subscribed becuase of such great advice.
hey! what do you recommend to replace AWS?
what are good alternatives for aws? you mentioned to stay away from it... so what should we use instead? also, any examples why specifically it was hard to work with? just asking because i'm trying to start something of my own :)
I have a video of my newest tech stack on my channel!
Why not hosting redis and db on heroku itself?
Hi andy, can you please suggest me some gumroad alternative that provides subscriptiom methods integration with rest api and has payouts for payoneer or direct bank account? My country does not have paypal or stripe.
Vercel discourages using Cloudflare while also hosting on Vercel - what's your opinion on that?
Personally as long as it all works fine, I'd take Cloudflare over vercel any day - as long as you disable proxying and let vercel do things like Image caching it should be okay!
Where is Jared?
What about if i deploy saas product on my vps?! Database on neon, u will save a lot of costs?!
so, to run a SAAS we need loads of SAASs.
the self fulfilling prophecy
You don't. Back in the days you would do these things on your own. A SaaS is there to make your life faster, easier etc... would you rather pay 50$ a month or spend $10k doing it yourslef with medicore solutions?
Yeah that's the point, if you know how to make these saas software as per your requirement it's can get even cheaper and more reliable, scalable.@@aurelianspodarec2629
But why Heroku? It's 1GB RAM instance for $50 is insane.
Pythonanywhere 3gb ram for 5$.
Great video. Thanks very much.
Vercel should add alerts and implement protections around there limits. It seems unfair that you can get stinged so easily
100%
Is heroku really cheaper than AWS?
"Don't use AWS use Vercel"
"Vercel screwed us over but AWS hasn't"
The hell did I just watch
Vercel is just reselling aws anyway
vercel is using aws?
@@mrpetervideo yeah vercel just resells aws but makes them easier to use that's it
Best Info I've Run Into So Far! I've been mulling over 2 startup concepts and been brickWalled with all the puzzle pieces and cost$!
Sub'd & 👍Liked!
Can you do a vid on OpenSaaS?
Love your Content! Keep it Going!
Great to hear! Haven't looked into OpenSaas but I'll take a look :)
"DEPLOYMENT_NOT_FOUND" looks like Vercel is playing you again
very informative video, thanks!
glad it helped!!
Can I ask a question? Do you code the webapp all by yourself or use a no-code platform like webflow?
Yup! Self coded - i have a video on my channel about the tech stack I used!
what do you use with upstash that you managed to replace?
Hi, what do you think Azure to host app and and databases so that the database connection isn't exposed to public internet?
ha, i remember lots of billing issues with vercel
Awesome video man.
Thank you!
have you ever tried railway? I think it can be pretty useful
I actually have not! What;s it about?
So you went from 6-700 usd/m on aws to 600 usd/m spread over 7 services whereof at least a few will massively overcharge regularly... sounds... not like a win?
After switching off AWS last year we added a ton of stuff on - with AWS this probably would have been closer to 1k a month
Very helpful video bro, thanks so much
Glad it helped man!
why not consolidate the uptime robot with the betterstack's uptime checker?
Yeah! Actually didn't know betterstack had uptime stuff until recently, just swapped onto them for logs at first
Do not rely on cloudflare. Only use the services that can be easily replaced and always be ready to move to another provider. Because when cloudflare decides to fuck you over its game over.
And just in general its a really bad advise to lock yourself in a specific ecosystem. You can do it if you think its the right decision, but suggesting it to others is stupid. A "Senior" Dev should know better.
Also for 600USD you could get a whole fleet of dedicated servers and deploy there. Maybe get an external caching service and obv. a DNS provider and youre good to go. 100% no hidden fees and most likely way more performant. I dont know the cost of dedicated servers in the US but here in Germany 600USD would get you 1.8TB of RAM and 112 CPU Cores across 14 Nodes.
How about domestic and international digital tax compliance costs? This is totally critical and a total nightmare if not setup correctly 🤯
when you say AWS isnt cheap and others are better? which others could you at leaast mention a few? thanks
Yeah! You can check out my tech stack video on what I currently use - but for domain buying you can use CF, hosting node applications you can use heroku, hosting React / nextjs you can use vercel, CICD you can use Gitlab
Do it makes any sense for you to run any of those services on a 25$ dollars or cheaper VPS?
hmm there might be great alternatives! This the stack I think is the most popular then
Why do you not use betterstack for uptime monitoring?
i didn’t know they offered it!
How much money do you make from it?
how are you managing latency between all these servers?
Hasn't been much of an issue! They only connect to eachother via our DB so it's the latency that you'd naturally have from frontend/backend supabase, which is quite low.
Great video, thanks for answering my question in previous video about making this kind of topic!
Do you have a video about cloudflare? How to install it correctly, what is does and so on?
I have heard a lot about cloudflare, but never understood it correctly.
Thanks!
Not yet! Might make something on it in the future though, great idea!
This is a great video. I just found your channel, but this gold. I don't know if I missed it, but would you tell how many customers you serve with that costs or how many visits your apps get a month, mostly to estimate the cost per user (paid or not) or cost per number of hits a month?
Yeah! For the old one we get 500k+ pageviews/month and but our rev comes from our actual SaaS subs which takes up almost no usage tech wise
Supabase is based on AWS :)
WHY DO YOU PRONOUNCE VERCEL LIKE THAT
Guys I am confused. I simply need a landing page, a page where the user can use my program after log in and my program connected with my program which runs in the cloud. Do you have any suggestions which offers all this on one platform?
I haven’t come across an all-in-one solution but you should look at firebase if you’re new. Lets you handle authentication, database, Google functions can trigger on requests (your program) it’s all serverless so no need to worry about any of that stuff either! Gl!
Just ran into the billing issues with vercel, $700 bill, never been more than $100. Took them 2 weeks to respond
Hey, how much does this startup make per year?
Great videos!!!
Glad you like them!
can you develop on why you avoid using aws ?
AWS has hidden costs everywhere, and was a nightmare to maintain and debug. Our pipelines on AWS were 20mins + to deploy, when I moved to vercel, they were 1 minute or less. AWS has more customization but overall is suuuuper bulky and ridden with hidden costs.
Great video❤
I'm here from tiktok waiting for jared
So no cost related to branding, registering as and LLC or Corp or any of the long list of little things you need for your business to be registered and legitimate? Just $100/month? I'm sorry I'm pretty shocked here. I'm all ears if someone wants to explain but this just sounds way too good to be true.
So these costs are with how many monthly users using your platform? 🤔
500k monthly pageviews
Why is cpanel not a good option ?? .. pay for cpanel and point a domain on it
CPanel is a bit outdated ... i'm sure it still works if you're familiar with it!
There’s such an insane glut of SaaS offerings now that don’t need to exist. It’s basically shovelware.
The money is in selling the tools to the witless prospectors.
There are just too many horror stories about Vercel ! I would steer clear of them, one DDOS and say goodbye to profitability.
I was never able to understand what kind of SaaS can one make that people would actually pay to use.
I clicked like after you said "I hate AWS" 😅
Honestly don't even get why people keep praising this UNREASONABLY hard-to-use service
Yup!!
have you checked section 174 in the tax code yet
how do you earn money from these projects ?
For my esports SaaS, we get $ from advertising, and $ from our subscription plan for teams
Do you use an identity provider?
Just basic Auth!
No Heroku, cuz, support is BAD in my experience, they shut down my application for days without a legit reason, luckily that was a PoC application. AWS is bit of expensive however, by far the best support team, most fast, reliable DB, less latency, RDS ever I see.
Nice video!
Thanks for the visit!
I was just about to use AWS :)
And why are you not?
@@aurelianspodarec2629 He said we shouldnt use it if we can :)
Haha still a decent option for more complex stuff, but yeah, I'd def steer away if there's better alternatives for your use cases
@@francisnjugunaldc Isn't that with every single thing in our life? :)
It all depends, doens't it. Its subjective based on what you need.
@@aurelianspodarec2629 I still used AWS that what's am more proficient at☺️🙏