Guides
Plain-English guides to choosing and paying for the services behind your app.
- Adding AI to your app: models, free tiers and gatewaysWhat AI model calls cost per month, which free tiers publish their limits, which use your data, and when an AI gateway is worth adding. · 6 min read
- Background jobs and queues for small appsInngest, Trigger.dev, Upstash QStash and Amazon SQS. How each one counts a job, where the free tiers stop, and what 10,000 users cost. · 4 min read
- The cheapest way to host a websiteFree static hosting on Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel and AWS Amplify, plus what a .com really costs to keep at four registrars. · 5 min read
- CI minutes and serverless functionsFree CI minutes on GitHub Actions, GitLab and CircleCI, and what AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers and Google Cloud Run charge to run your code. · 5 min read
- File storage and egress fees, explainedWhy downloads can cost more than storage, and how Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Amazon S3, Bunny and DigitalOcean Spaces compare as you grow. · 5 min read
- App hosting: PaaS or a VPS?Render, Railway, Fly.io and DigitalOcean App Platform against Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode servers. Free tiers, sizes and bandwidth. · 6 min read
- Search engines and vector databasesAlgolia, Meilisearch and Typesense for site search, and pgvector, Pinecone, Qdrant and turbopuffer for AI search. What each costs and when you need one. · 5 min read
- Supabase, Neon or Turso? Choosing a database for a new appHow the three popular hosted databases bill, where their free plans stop, and which one fits which kind of project. · 2 min read
- The free-tier traps that catch new developersNon-commercial terms, idle pausing, daily caps and hard stops. What each one means, which services have them, and how to plan around them. · 2 min read
- Stripe or a merchant of record? Paying for paymentsWhy Paddle, Polar and Lemon Squeezy charge about 5% while Stripe charges less, and when the higher fee is worth it. · 1 min read