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.
Public stack
Production Python backend for AI-powered applications — designed for the async I/O, complex dependencies, and long-running inference jobs that come with serving language models at real traffic.
Workflow stack
Persistent storage
Stores conversation history, user profiles, and AI output logs — the pgvector extension adds similarity search for RAG pipelines without a separate vector database.
Open tool profileTask queue
Celery broker for long-running inference jobs like document parsing and batch generation — keeps the API response time fast by pushing heavy work to background workers.
Open tool profileContainer packaging
Pin exact Python and package versions in a container — AI dependencies are notoriously fragile and reproducible builds prevent the worked-in-dev-failed-in-prod incidents.
Open tool profileDeployment
Deploy containers close to users globally with persistent volumes for model weights — simpler than EKS for AI workloads that don't need full Kubernetes orchestration.
Open tool profileError monitoring
Full Python async tracebacks for FastAPI — captures coroutine failures, LLM timeout errors, and Celery task exceptions with the full request context attached.
Open tool profileRedis 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).
Personal $0: Desktop, Engine, Hub (100 pulls/hr logged in), 1 private repo, 1 Scout-enabled repo; Pro ~$9/mo yearly (~$11 monthly) with unlimited Hub pulls; Team ~$15/mo yearly (~$16 mo); Business ~$24/user/mo with SSO and registry policies (docker.com/pricing).
Global application platform running Firecracker VMs (Machines) near users: Anycast networking, volumes, Managed Postgres, granular egress pricing, and optional Fly Kubernetes.
Error monitoring, performance tracing, logs, session replay, profiling, and uptime products for developers—SDKs across major languages and frameworks with issue workflow at the center.
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