6 tools
Budget Self-Hosted Stack
I run five side projects on one DigitalOcean Droplet for $24 a month. This stack handles 80k monthly visitors combined and has taught me more about infrastructure than years of managed platforms ever did.
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Public stack
For founders who want Heroku or Railway convenience without ongoing platform markup. One VPS, self-hosted deploy control, and enough primitives to run multiple real apps from a single box.
Workflow stack
Service packaging
Packages each app predictably so the same service definitions work locally and on the server.
Open tool profilePrimary database
One reliable relational database can support several apps before you need anything more exotic.
Open tool profileQueues and cache
Handles cache, sessions, and background queue primitives that most real apps eventually need.
Open tool profileTraffic router
Terminates SSL and routes traffic cleanly across multiple apps and domains on the same machine.
Open tool profileVPS hosting
A plain VPS keeps costs honest and pairs well with a stack you actually control.
Open tool profileRelated stacks
I run five side projects on one DigitalOcean Droplet for $24 a month. This stack handles 80k monthly visitors combined and has taught me more about infrastructure than years of managed platforms ever did.
Python backend for teams that want admin panel, ORM, migrations, and auth out of the box. Django's batteries-included approach means you're shipping product instead of assembling a framework from twelve separate packages.
I had five years of Django code and wanted a modern React frontend without a full rewrite. This hybrid keeps the Python backend that works and replaces the Jinja templates with something my team actually enjoys.
Redis Cloud Free $0: 30 MB shared; Essentials from ~$0.007/hr (about $5/mo total on card) 250 MB–100 GB; Pro from ~$0.014/hr with $200 free trial credit and $200/mo minimum—dedicated tier, active-active, higher SLA (redis.io/pricing).
nginx (open source) is BSD-2-Clause—$0; F5 NGINX Plus is commercial with quoted pricing (nginx.org, March 2026).
Developer cloud: Droplets from $4/mo, managed Kubernetes from $12/mo, App Platform and Functions with $0 entry tiers, Spaces object storage from $5/mo, and managed databases from $15/mo—plus bandwidth and GPU SKUs on published lists.
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