I am a software developer with a full time job. My salary is not enough for me rely completely on job, and I cant take the risk of leaving my job and finding another one, because I live paycheck to paycheck and dont have any savings.

Lurking through buildinpublic and here on reddit, I feel like a loser.

I am comparatively good doing full stack development ( Nodejs, React etc ). Considering my strong and weak points I came up with following projects in 2 categories.

  1. Build some products My strong points are: I can spend time building projects, but I dont have money to buy servers or to launch them, minimum cost considering database and all would be around $100/month ( Coming from India, this amount is huge for me, Its approx 8000/month )
  2. Build design templates I can spend time learning about designs since, initial investment here is low ( cost of figma, framer ) and then sell templates which can eventually help me earn sustainable amount of money, But issue is, My design skills are complete zero. For example, I get confused when I want to decide colors, or fonts.

So which path I should spend my time on ?

  • adwaithks@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Try digital ocean for server (VPS), planetscale for database (digital ocean is also good). netlify for frontend hosting.

  • shivanshmehendiratta@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    if you register a llc or a pvt ltd in india (<10000), you should be eligible for credits by most cloud providers. so if servers are the only blocker for (1), this might solve it.

  • supacoda@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    What are you trying to build which will take $100 per month? If you go for AWS lightsail, DigitalOcean, Linode etc. it will be about $5 for a small VPS where you can install your own database. Once you feel soneone is going to pay for your app you can upgrade to a bigger server. If you have a serious idea you can apply for azure startup founders hub which will give you $1000 free credit for a year. AWS has similar programs for startup.

  • xieyschaan@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    How good are you with building things? I might have a proposition for you if you are good.

  • servesociety@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    You can deploy an app on Heroku with a DB for about $20 per month.

    I would try to launch something as quickly as possible, because that’s the quickest way to learn. Come up with an idea, work out how quickly you can get something out (ideally less than one month), charge for it, then scale up your servers when you have people paying you.

  • xxbbzzcc@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    You can keep the cost low by using the following techniques (I am using both):

    1. Use Next.js + MongoDB + Vercel (All free tier): If your apps can be 100% serverless, this will ideally give you a bill of $0/month.

    Checkout Letters. I have been running it for two years now and paid $0 till date.

    1. Use a cheap $5/month droplet(VM) from Digital Ocean + MongoDB: If your apps need a long running server, this way you can keep the cost fixed.

    Deploy all of your apps in the same VM and use Caddy for reverse proxy.

    DM me if you need help.

  • CryptoMonops@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I’m always looking for full stack devs to work with on side projects. We have a Web3 agency and could always use a hand with some of the non web 3 stuff that comes our way. We should talk!

  • pentaclay@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I liked how detailed you wrote about your problems. Most of the users just write within 4/5 lines with no context.

    However, you can start with making plugins and selling them on platform like codecanyon. No design skills are needed.