[avinoth]

I wouldn't say this one to be frugal, but then frugality varies by different parameters. What they priortize (Eg: a dedicated marketing tool vs sending marketing through app itself), what their expertise in (hosting in vps vs aws vs heroku, etc), the type of service, team size and so on. As there are 10 ways to do the same thing all with a different tradeoffs.

Being solo myself, I aim to keep my costs as low as possible as well. Until my last product, all my previous products I kept the running costs to $3 per month (just for the server on hetzner). Rest all were free services (tawk.to for CS, Zoho for email, postmark for emails, and so on). Granted they weren't making much, just couple of hundred dollars per month, but then it was pure profit and it got fun to measure the returns in profit than just revenue.

For the latest one, all in all I spend around $30 per month with close to $1250 in mrr. So it has generous spend to return ratio. The only three running cost are the helpscout (for customer support, docs, etc.), google workspace and the servers with Hetzner. HelpScout and Google workspace were my way of "splurging" the costs.

Last I checked I was using close to 16 services (ranging from marketing to revenue tracking), so weren't really skimping on tools to save costs either.

The free tools (including several the op mentioned) are awesome to get started, but many of these services' costs would jump multi-fold even if you add one other team member or go just above the limit. That's anyway all these services' business model as well.

[swaggyBoatswain]

I think the author here is prioritizing simplicity of deployments above all else, because he realizes time is money. The amount of time to build something VS paying to use an off the shelf item is an important decision to make, and I think the author made good decisions across the board

The author does come across more as a business/operations person first, developer second. Most developers would not consider tools like ahrefs or intercom or even realize that marketing is generally more difficult/important than the develpment work itself

Relatively speaking even at all these costs I would consider this to be frugal. If your a skilled developer you would easily be worth at least $100/hr

Taking off the shelf solutions with easy scalability of services for adding additional people operationally is important

time saved is time earned, time is money, and money saved is money earned

[dml2135]

Would you be able to share what your products are? I'd love to host a small service like this, but struggle to come up with something that would be both useful and profitable at a small scale.

[avinoth]

Sure. Broadly this is the list. Many of these are my go-to's for all my products. Only the Project management, I had to keep trying new things. Most favorite for now is Trello.

Also, I use dokku for deployment, so it's very similar to heroku and uses heroku buildpacks.

Hetzner - Servers.

Helpscout - Customer helpdesk

Google - workspace Email

Github - Source code

Airbrake - Error monitoring

Posthog - Analytics

Shortcut - Project management

Canny - Feedback & Changelog announcement

Stoplight - API documentation

Slack - For app testing

UptimeRobot - Uptime monitoring

MRR - For subscription tracking

Mailgun - Transactional Emails

Reform - One time used for feedback collection

Calendly - Call bookings

Paddle - Payment platform