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
Four students, one repo, one database, and a live demo before the deadline. This is the stack I'd use for a semester project when the team needs auth, analytics, and something stable enough to present.
Workflow stack
Database and auth
Gives the team a real Postgres database, auth, and storage without spending the project budget on backend infrastructure.
Open tool profileTeam collaboration
PRs, issues, and code review keep everyone working in the open, which matters fast when four people are merging on the last night.
Open tool profilePreview URLs
Every branch gets a demo URL, so teammates and professors can review the actual product instead of screenshots in a slide.
Open tool profileUsage analytics
Track signups, feature clicks, and demo usage so the final presentation can show real product behavior instead of guesses.
Open tool profileBug catchers
Catches the bugs that only show up on other people's laptops before they ruin the in-class demo.
Open tool profileFrontend cloud from the Next.js creators: Git-connected deployments, preview URLs per branch, serverless and edge functions, CDN, analytics, and team workflows—optimized for modern JavaScript frameworks.
Open-core analytics, replay, flags, experiments, error tracking, warehouse, pipelines, and logs on PostHog Cloud—generous per-product free tiers each month, then usage-based rates (e.g. ~$0.00005/event for analytics after the first 1M events).
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.
Compare tools in this stack