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
I've deployed backends to AWS, DigitalOcean, Fly, and now Railway. This is the stack that finally lets me focus on building the actual API instead of fighting the infrastructure around it.
Workflow stack
Primary database
I've never regretted choosing Postgres. Every feature I need eventually has an extension for it — jsonb, full-text search, PostGIS for geospatial data.
Open tool profileCache and queues
Background jobs with BullMQ for emails and webhooks, plus caching for queries that don't need to hit Postgres on every single request.
Open tool profileContainerization
Every developer on the team runs the exact same environment locally. Eliminates an entire category of debugging sessions that start with 'works on my machine'.
Open tool profileHosting
One config file and Railway provisions Postgres, Redis, and my app container together. Replaced a complicated ECS setup that nobody on the team wanted to maintain.
Open tool profileError monitoring
First thing I open when something goes wrong in production. The NestJS integration captures full request context so I can reproduce bugs within minutes instead of hours.
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.
Add enterprise SSO, SCIM provisioning, and audit logs to your SaaS product without building it in-house. The identity features enterprise procurement teams require before signing a purchase order.
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.
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).
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).
Railway deploys services and databases from Git or Docker with usage-based CPU, memory, volume, and egress billing—Hobby and Pro plans include monthly usage credits.
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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