Yesterday I made a discussion about the recurring expenses as a developer. I got a great reply from @ben, which resonated in me:
The worst expense is a project which you won't admit you'll never get back to but you're still paying that $50 a month for the collective expenses.
When creating new projects (especially complex ones with multiple services involved) I always try to think about the long-term maintenance and scalability aspects, so I replied:
Excatly, I was gonna say 😀 You must think in long term in the very beginning when choosing the stack and weight all the ifs for the possible abandonment due to new projects with higher potential, etc 😉
For example, I'm very happy with the stack I chose for my most recent project devQuizzes (a quizz platform where users can test their dev knowledge in over 500 questions across 20 categories):
I picked GitHub to store all the data (each question is a seperate .md file in the repo), Airtable for users to submit new questions and submit edits for the question (I use their API for this, so the inputs are stored in their Sheets), Vercel to host it all (which I absolutely love, no promo btw) and for the domain I created a subdomain quizzes.madza.dev for the only domain I own madza.dev (I use NameCheap, which I found in this discussion, thanks to you guys), meaning I can still buy a separate domain and set up redirect to it if the project starts to become something serious.
This means that the total maintenance costs for the project is zero and I am not limited to move to other projects if I want to in the future without sacrificing my bank account.
The question for this discussion is:
Do you have any abandoned (inactive) projects that you must pay for monthly/yearly to keep them running? Like hosting, domain, database, storage and other costs.
Also, what are the key lessons you learned from it (what would you do different when setting up the same project today)?
Top comments (8)
Technically this project doesn't cost me anything more because I have been stopping it. But since then I have spent about 15$ for the domain and $5 for the VPS.
How to Redirect a domain only using DNS records
Wildan Mubarok ・ Aug 22 ・ 2 min read
I choose not to continue it because my other project is crossing the budget limit and the fact that I'm in the third world country where $5 a month actually is a moderate sum of money haha.
Interesting read 😉 Also, learned about forwarddomain.net, thanks for that 👍😉
Update. This projects is now back online! 😁
This service is now back online with some improvements!🔥
Good job on it and congrats 😉👍
My old projects are either source code only or PHP webpage, which costs almost nothing to operate.
Nowadays I'm having some Docker based services, and they would have a recurring cost to operate even if nobody is using them, because each server's RAM can only fit that many containers.
Thanks for the insight 🙏❤
I also don't need to pay for any of my projects because almost all of them are Open Source. Except I own few domains that I need to pay, and also for my shared hosting.
If you just starting with the project It doesn't make sense to use paid service with montly fee, better is to pick service that have free tier and where you pay if you get more trafic. So if you abandon the project you will pay nothing.
Thanks for sharing 🙏❤