📌 Last week, I wrote about Cloud Rent in Action – how layers of middlemen drive up the cost of running a simple SaaS stack. Netlify's new pricing update feels like the same story, playing out live.
When you pay for cloud hosting, you're not just paying for compute. You're paying rent. And it adds up fast.
Building a PaaS as a solo founder means making choices. Some deliberate, some accidental, all of them tradeoffs.
Every tool comes with pros and cons, and the deciding factor is usually the most expensive resource of all: time.
If I can get the job done with something I already know, I'll take that path. I'll learn new tools when the project pays for it. Until then, it's all about moving forward with what works.
Here's how Hostim.dev is put together today – the stack that runs every app, database, and service behind the scenes.
Most side projects start the same way.
You grab a VPS from Hetzner or DigitalOcean, install Docker, run docker compose up, and boom – you're live.
It feels cheap. It feels simple. Until it isn't.
When you talk to enough developers about how they deploy projects, a few patterns start to emerge. Some are obvious in hindsight, others caught me completely off guard.
Here are my biggest takeaways so far.
These days, hosting your app often means choosing between complexity, lock-in, and sky-high pricing. Whether it's a shiny new platform or a slick developer tool, most of them are just wrappers around the same old giants: AWS, GCP, and Azure.
And those giants are expensive by design.