How do you keep hosting and infrastructure costs low?

Last time I said the Cloudflare move was planned and the live map was going live soon.

Both happened today, in one 2h 52m session with Claude Opus 5.5.

A little summary of what got done.

The move
- Kiiwi went from Vercel to Cloudflare, and was down for about a minute, only while two DNS records swapped
- Hosting cost is now $0. Cloudflare's free plan allows commercial use, Vercel Hobby doesn't, and Pro wasn't in the lane
- 7 API routes moved without rewriting a single one. The same api/ files run on both hosts, behind one Worker
- Activate, checkout, license, feedback, share cards: all tested on the new host by actually buying, downloading and activating the app
- A push to main now deploys The first build failed because there was no build step, so wrangler runs it now

Share cards
- The card renderer wanted to fetch a Google font on every single render
- A small shim bundles the same Noto Sans Vercel used, so the cards stay pixel identical

Live map
- It's live, on real data
- 6,678 dots on a 1.5 degree grid, each one knowing its country
- Countries glow by their totals, city dots are coloured by switch family
- A line under the map shows the leading country and where your own country ranks
- It moved above pricing, so it's the proof you see right before the price

Site fixes
- Tablet layout: the MacBook mockup no longer breaks at 761 to 820px, and no more sideways scroll at 1024px
- Section spacing cut from about 220px to about 130px
- A Gatekeeper FAQ for opening Kiiwi until it's notarized. It goes away once it is
- A privacy page that names DataFast, its cookies and Cloudflare as the host
- Brand files said Kiwi, not Kiiwi. Fixed

Sound
- Measured all 46 sound packs for loudness: a 22 dB gap between the quietest and the loudest
- So too quiet was never the volume slider. Normalising the packs is next

Bugs worth remembering
- Returning visitors saw an empty map. Their browser still had yesterday's JS cached from Vercel, so the new code never loaded. Script URLs are versioned now
- The map stat and the navbar counter showed different numbers. Both show the same all-time count now
- I spotted /.env requests in the logs. Just bots scanning, every private file returns 404 and none was ever committed

What I learnt
- Moving hosts is mostly the stuff you forgot exists: a proxy rewrite, a cache header, a font fallback, a privacy page still naming the old host
- Measure before tuning. Too quiet turned out to be a 22 dB spread, not a slider

What I'd avoid
- Deploying from a local folder. It nearly published an unfinished privacy page. Git deploys only now

Parked for later: my own analytics on Cloudflare, a Durable Object for a truly live counter, pack loudness normalisation, and a stats page with a welcome tour.

Still open: Developer ID and notarization.

♥ 2 · the post on X

Finally moved Tuboard to cloudfare. It's literally a gem. I struggled so much with vercel you have no idea...

Cloudflare:
- Free hosting
- No extra domain fees
- Free database storage
- Free email records
- Bot protection

Vercel:
- ???

♥ 1 · the post on X

Moved my game that has 100k monthly visits from Supabase to Cloudflare D1 database for cost and speed optimizations.

Cut down my monthly cost from 50$ per month to 5$

10x cheaper and works even better than Supabase since its distributed on the whole Cloudflare network.

Also moved the multiplayer logic and everything just works faster.

I love how I can run a game with 100k monthly visits for 5$ a month crazy times we live in.

♥ 236 · the post on X

My last monthly Cloudflare bill was $5.15.

My start up's backends handled roughly 6.5 million requests during the billed month.

That also covers the website, databases and my MCP tools.

Plus my own analytics dashboard.

$5 for the plan. 15 cents for search storage.

Cloudflare is the goat.

♥ 3 · the post on X

I've just migrated an entire product from Vercel and Supabase to a self-hosted setup.

@SimonHoiberg talks about this a lot, and I decided it was time to finally do that and put it all on @Hetzner_Online with @openshipio. OpenShip is AWESOME!

Codex did a lot of the work for me, including making DNS changes in Cloudflare. And I feel... liberated.

Look, Vercel and Supabase are fine, they get you from 0-1 in no time and if you're testing a product, that's the way to go. But paying for their abusive charges when your product is barely making a living is crazy. 🤪

♥ 1 · the post on X

I am comparing now what I have on Hetzner + self-hosting VS managed solutions.

My total costs right now on hetzner are just 38 euro per month. It is 5 different VPS with 16 vCPU and and 32GB RAM altogether.

The alternative solution on one of cloud providers:
- Managed DB (3x (1 CPU+4GB RAM) = 235 Euro per month. It is the cheapest option
- Computing (24 vCPU + 48GB RAM) = 460 euro per month. it is a bigger cluster that I have right now to be fair but it would be like 60 euro on hetzner.

Self-hosting is winning so far haha. Especially if you are poor :D

♥ 22 · the post on X

got a usage warning from vercel so i actually read the bill

a second copy of one of my sites had been rebuilding itself on every push since january. nothing ever pointed at it. eight months of builds nobody could have seen

the live one was also regenerating 291 pages an hour for pages nobody reads

♥ 1 · the post on X

Solo builders who ship in public:

What do you actually pay for each month?

• Hosting (VPS / cloud / PaaS)
• Coding / AI tools (Cursor, Claude, Copilot, etc.)
• Anything else you refuse to cancel

I’ll go first:
• Hetzner CPX32 (x86, 160 GB) → $17.09/mo
• 6 home servers running a few projects (haven’t measured the electricity yet)
• X Premium+ → $23.54 for 2 months, then $47.07/mo
• Claude → $200/year

Thinking about adding Cursor or Codex next.
Which AI combo do you actually keep? Claude + Cursor, Codex, Copilot, something else?

Curious where the real money goes vs the shiny stack screenshots.

@marclou @levelsio @tdinh_me @tibo_maker

♥ 2 · the post on X