How much it costs me to run my SaaS's in 2024

Thanks for watching, and if you enjoy these deep dives into the tech founder life make sure you subscribe for more!
Join Startup & Tech Discord:
/ discord
Follow me on Insta:
/ asistilli
Other socials:
/ sistillianthony
/ anthonysistilli

[@Redlabel0]

User paying a SaaS paying a PaaS

[@AnthonySistilli]

lool

[@rajshah2130]

thats how it works lol and PaaS will pay a IaaS if its platform is remote

[@allanmachado2011]

I watched the material UI playlist way back when. It's great to see someone who isn't optimizing for being a youtube tutorial guru. Nothing better than learning from someone who is actually applying it to solve real world issues. Very cool!

[@AnthonySistilli]

Wow throwback haha - really appreciate the kind words man. Yeah I kinda got burnt out making tutorials, and it didn't fit in with what I was doing on a daily basis anyways... so I figured I'd try this instead hahaha.

[@joshuabiyinzika2834]

Hey man! I love your startup content. Thanks!

[@AnthonySistilli]

Thank you!!

[@Benjamin-Chavez]

Love the content homie. Good blend of tech and business, which isn’t something you find a lot of. Keep em coming man!

[@AnthonySistilli]

Thank you bro!! Anything in particular you'd like me to talk about? :)

[@rembautimes8808]

Thanks it’s really insightful. Vercel lost a potential customer today - will steer clear of them unless they change their ways

[@ifindev]

Great video and transparancy! Thanks for sharing this!!

[@AnthonySistilli]

Appreciate you!

[@SonAyoD]

You’re content is so valuable!

[@AnthonySistilli]

Glad it helps!!

[@raviss98]

Positive guy in tech & biz. Relevant content too. Keep such videos coming 😀

[@AnthonySistilli]

Appreciate you man!

[@lebronjaimeslannister]

that part on vercel hits hard damn

[@AnthonySistilli]

Haha, Vercel is great until it isn't

[@raideez]

Thank you for this one, been thinking about these exactly same questions what you presented in video. Espectially cloudflare + vercel anti ddos etc.

[@AnthonySistilli]

Glad it was helpful!

[@rickr937]

how are you scraping instagram tho? can you make an in depth video on how you run continuous scraping and how you host it?

[@davidmenache]

An enlightening and fresh perspective. Thanks!

[@AnthonySistilli]

Glad it was helpful!

[@argenistherose]

nice video man, enjoying this content

[@AnthonySistilli]

Glad it's useful!

[@kobibr9362]

Yeah I am not touching vercel. I am scared of it. What is going on with aws? Have you tried SST to deploy on AWS? My next stack will be pretty simple NextJS, payload CMS, serverless functions for cron jobs and event bus all the way( they run for almost free) and SST will hold all of that together.

[@mario_luis_dev]

this content is pure gold. Great work Anthony 👏

[@AnthonySistilli]

Glad it's valuable to you man!! I'll keep it up :)

[@azadali7114]

You mentioned you have about 4 year's worth of data on all matches on your first SaaS, can you disclose how much TB that is approximately in your AWS db? I'm currently on AWS S3 for the storage of sound recordings, im curious how that would scale approximately

[@deejaydev]

Very helpful video bro, thanks so much

[@AnthonySistilli]

Glad it helped man!

[@karajkot6735]

Hi, what do you think Azure to host app and and databases so that the database connection isn't exposed to public internet?

[@finn_the_dog]

This is a great video. I just found your channel, but this gold. I don't know if I missed it, but would you tell how many customers you serve with that costs or how many visits your apps get a month, mostly to estimate the cost per user (paid or not) or cost per number of hits a month?

[@AnthonySistilli]

Yeah! For the old one we get 500k+ pageviews/month and but our rev comes from our actual SaaS subs which takes up almost no usage tech wise

[@renato30]

what do you use with upstash that you managed to replace?

[@yellowboat8773]

Nice to see someone who actually does this for real

[@NetoPilsen]

hey! what do you recommend to replace AWS?

[@HHJoshHH]

Do you still feel the same about Cloud Flare in light of new events?

[@emcf2944]

Thanks for sharing your startups' finances like this! I noticed there are only tech stack costs on here; I find that a lot of my costs end up going towards marketing (although maybe that is just a signal that I am doing something wrong). Would you consider making a video on this subject?

[@AnthonySistilli]

Ah personally we had a $0 marketing policy! If the product was good it would spread through word of mouth usually

[@ptlogger]

I assume you initial app was working like AWS based using it's features, but did you try to compare those costs with other cloud hosting, like GCP, Azure (for example)? I know you say, when the AWS costs were getting high, you moved to parts of this features to separate services (heroku, betterstack,...) but did you evaluate the possibility to move to a different hosting as a bundle?

[@AnthonySistilli]

Nope! I think the silod applications like heroku, render, supabase, etc actually add so much QoL that I'd never move back to a full AWS setting.

[@w3mw]

Great video, thanks for answering my question in previous video about making this kind of topic! Do you have a video about cloudflare? How to install it correctly, what is does and so on? I have heard a lot about cloudflare, but never understood it correctly. Thanks!

[@AnthonySistilli]

Not yet! Might make something on it in the future though, great idea!

[@brandonmansfield6570]

That's a lot of vendors to depend on. I run 3 sites and my total is less than $30. Can be really rough to depend on metered services. Billing spikes are rough, especially when you are pre-revenue. Thanks for sharing the Vercel experience.

[@AnthonySistilli]

Great insights man thank you!! 3 sites for $30 is really awesome

[@dyrone7071]

what's your monthly income

[@andriypashynnyk4278]

very informative video, thanks!

[@AnthonySistilli]

glad it helped!!

[@egretfx]

when you say AWS isnt cheap and others are better? which others could you at leaast mention a few? thanks

[@AnthonySistilli]

Yeah! You can check out my tech stack video on what I currently use - but for domain buying you can use CF, hosting node applications you can use heroku, hosting React / nextjs you can use vercel, CICD you can use Gitlab

[@CodingPhase]

Great content ❤ new subscriber

[@AnthonySistilli]

Welcome!!

[@arnavahuja310]

what are good alternatives for aws? you mentioned to stay away from it... so what should we use instead? also, any examples why specifically it was hard to work with? just asking because i'm trying to start something of my own :)

[@AnthonySistilli]

I have a video of my newest tech stack on my channel!

[@elisimic4371]

Great video man! Btw how are you getting your Instagram data via API or scraping?

[@AnthonySistilli]

Fully API!

[@elisimic4371]

@@AnthonySistilli Thanks a lot for the response! I am working with the Basic Display API although it is quite restrictive, I'm assuming you are using the Graph API?

[@user-es9es8gm7l]

Is heroku really cheaper than AWS?

[@jonathanrodriguez1233]

Hey, how much does this startup make per year?

[@gambomaster]

What would you recommend for a SAAS developed in a Django framework? AWS or Heroku? Have heard from others also regarding AWS's hidden costs. 😷

[@AnthonySistilli]

heroku usually is fine, easy to get started, low cost - I think with SaaS's speed is key, and AWS has a large learning curve

[@stanleyjekwu6810]

Great video❤

[@jitx2797]

Awesome video man.

[@AnthonySistilli]

Thank you!

[@st.toussaint4632]

Great videos!!!

[@AnthonySistilli]

Glad you like them!

[@sergiob3698]

Super interesting thank you

[@AnthonySistilli]

Appreciate you!!

[@user-op1im6vv7q]

could you also please share the employee cost with a breakdown for the number of employees you have working for each startup, like x engineers, y designers and z growth marketers, etc

[@AnthonySistilli]

Great question!! I will cover this for sure!

[@user-op1im6vv7q]

@@AnthonySistilli awesome, looking forward to it

[@user-hl2sk1tp6m]

Can I ask a question? Do you code the webapp all by yourself or use a no-code platform like webflow?

[@AnthonySistilli]

Yup! Self coded - i have a video on my channel about the tech stack I used!

[@jameswainwright5217]

Vercel should add alerts and implement protections around there limits. It seems unfair that you can get stinged so easily

[@AnthonySistilli]

100%

[@ReflectingEnergy]

Stay away from AWS. …we’re using Vercel, an AWS wrapper. 😄

[@AnthonySistilli]

hahaha wrappers are useful for a reason

[@Vorenus875]

Heroku is an AWS wrapper too 😂 This video quickly became “the cost of not knowing AWS”

[@raunaquepatra3966]

​@@Vorenus875but the wrappers are cheaper when the site is not that big

[@polyander]

Vercel discourages using Cloudflare while also hosting on Vercel - what's your opinion on that?

[@AnthonySistilli]

Personally as long as it all works fine, I'd take Cloudflare over vercel any day - as long as you disable proxying and let vercel do things like Image caching it should be okay!

[@shantanuojha3578]

how are you managing latency between all these servers?

[@AnthonySistilli]

Hasn't been much of an issue! They only connect to eachother via our DB so it's the latency that you'd naturally have from frontend/backend supabase, which is quite low.

[@we-shall]

so, to run a SAAS we need loads of SAASs.

[@AnthonySistilli]

the self fulfilling prophecy

[@aurelianspodarec2629]

You don't. Back in the days you would do these things on your own. A SaaS is there to make your life faster, easier etc... would you rather pay 50$ a month or spend $10k doing it yourslef with medicore solutions?

[@inferious777]

Vercel is great if youre publishing projects with virtually no users but once you get over even like 100 concurrent active users its very easy to ecceed their limits. AWS imo just targets growing companies with tons of capital. I'd recommend just renting vps/vdses, they have their own risks of course like reliability, etc. but the prices are way more affordable. Plus learning devops to me is fun + a free skill for your resume.

[@petergiurgiubeta]

Subscribed!

[@pengurrito7136]

Why do you not use betterstack for uptime monitoring?

[@AnthonySistilli]

i didn’t know they offered it!

[@bryanzawlocki]

Just ran into the billing issues with vercel, $700 bill, never been more than $100. Took them 2 weeks to respond

[@ComfyCosi]

why not consolidate the uptime robot with the betterstack's uptime checker?

[@AnthonySistilli]

Yeah! Actually didn't know betterstack had uptime stuff until recently, just swapped onto them for logs at first

[@neociber24]

Do it makes any sense for you to run any of those services on a 25$ dollars or cheaper VPS?

[@AnthonySistilli]

hmm there might be great alternatives! This the stack I think is the most popular then

[@andreapanzeri5252]

have you ever tried railway? I think it can be pretty useful

[@AnthonySistilli]

I actually have not! What;s it about?

[@user-tf5ur1tz3w]

Supabase is based on AWS :)

[@spicer41282]

Best Info I've Run Into So Far! I've been mulling over 2 startup concepts and been brickWalled with all the puzzle pieces and cost$! Sub'd & 👍Liked! Can you do a vid on OpenSaaS? Love your Content! Keep it Going!

[@AnthonySistilli]

Great to hear! Haven't looked into OpenSaas but I'll take a look :)

[@danielmarco7863]

Nice video!

[@AnthonySistilli]

Thanks for the visit!

[@KuroUsagi1010]

Where is Jared?

[@MikeNugget]

But why Heroku? It's 1GB RAM instance for $50 is insane.

[@repotranstech9614]

Pythonanywhere 3gb ram for 5$.

[@wassimregaieg5814]

can you develop on why you avoid using aws ?

[@AnthonySistilli]

AWS has hidden costs everywhere, and was a nightmare to maintain and debug. Our pipelines on AWS were 20mins + to deploy, when I moved to vercel, they were 1 minute or less. AWS has more customization but overall is suuuuper bulky and ridden with hidden costs.

[@RogerMadeThis]

So these costs are with how many monthly users using your platform? 🤔

[@AnthonySistilli]

500k monthly pageviews

[@ognjenilic4022]

How many users do u have right now that pays u monthly

[@AnthonySistilli]

For the esports business over a few hundred

[@exhaleheart]

Why is cpanel not a good option ?? .. pay for cpanel and point a domain on it

[@AnthonySistilli]

CPanel is a bit outdated ... i'm sure it still works if you're familiar with it!

[@francisnjugunaldc]

I was just about to use AWS :)

[@aurelianspodarec2629]

And why are you not?

[@francisnjugunaldc]

@@aurelianspodarec2629 He said we shouldnt use it if we can :)

[@AnthonySistilli]

Haha still a decent option for more complex stuff, but yeah, I'd def steer away if there's better alternatives for your use cases

[@aurelianspodarec2629]

@@francisnjugunaldc Isn't that with every single thing in our life? :) It all depends, doens't it. Its subjective based on what you need.

[@francisnjugunaldc]

@@aurelianspodarec2629 I still used AWS that what's am more proficient at☺️🙏

[@danielayota26]

how do you earn money from these projects ?

[@AnthonySistilli]

For my esports SaaS, we get $ from advertising, and $ from our subscription plan for teams

[@fulltimefrontend]

There are just too many horror stories about Vercel ! I would steer clear of them, one DDOS and say goodbye to profitability.

[@chrodin]

So you went from 6-700 usd/m on aws to 600 usd/m spread over 7 services whereof at least a few will massively overcharge regularly... sounds... not like a win?

[@AnthonySistilli]

After switching off AWS last year we added a ton of stuff on - with AWS this probably would have been closer to 1k a month

[@parkerwarner8688]

Do you use an identity provider?

[@AnthonySistilli]

Just basic Auth!

[@cruzergo]

Try ICP (Internet Computer) and let us know what you think.

[@AnthonySistilli]

Interesting!

[@SulsaCikkectuve]

Is it me or did you miss the big one Firebase

[@AnthonySistilli]

I personally stopped using firebase in 2019, but I'm sure they're still really good!

[@cirtey29]

Chad devs use VPS, mega chads have their own physical servers

[@cotyhamilton]

“Who doesn’t like next js other than a lot of people” 😂

[@Siddartbenagi0]

Sir please tell us how to build SAAS business for 49$ per month including all these sir z🙏🙏🙏

[@AnthonySistilli]

Every tool I mention has a free tier I believe - if your SaaS is just starting out you can probably build it for free (minus buying the domain!)

[@Siddartbenagi0]

@@AnthonySistilli k thx a lot sir

[@Kaisewhite]

Vercel and Heroku both run off AWS so you can never actually get away from AWS

[@AnthonySistilli]

haha atleast we can get away from their ui

[@digitnomad]

No Heroku, cuz, support is BAD in my experience, they shut down my application for days without a legit reason, luckily that was a PoC application. AWS is bit of expensive however, by far the best support team, most fast, reliable DB, less latency, RDS ever I see.

[@daveblack6951]

I swear by Azure!

[@blackdash225]

you should try supabase

[@AnthonySistilli]

I use Supabase for my latest startup :) Supabase didn't exist when I started my previous one unfortunately

[@blackdash225]

@@AnthonySistilli make a video on that stack

[@charliepersonalaccount5276]

What about moving all storage to Wasabi? Heard they're one of the cheapest?

[@AnthonySistilli]

never heard of them!

[@Kelz_codes]

You can tell someone is a junior developer just by listening to them

[@AnthonySistilli]

Hmmm lool

[@psychic8872]

You can always judge people and assign labels to them after listening to what they say

[@mussimbigrace3469]

What have you built beside your lil demos ? Humble yourself

[@jackmiddleton2080]

Hmmm I wonder what cloudfare is doing behind the scenes. I know they have the checkbox to confirm you're human.

[@chiperror2441]

You could run all this on a $50 VPS

[@AnthonySistilli]

not all of these costs are just hosting :)

[@chiperror2441]

You could probably replace your Vercel with just a self hosted nexjs app. All your heroku stuff could just be a big docker-compose file. Unless you're using Upstash anything else than redis, you can self host that too. Not saying *YOU* should do this, I'm just saying you/anyone could. I've been where you've been with Vercel and their amazing billing. I myself got a $420 bill from them not too long ago, moved right off and onto a DO vps, and haven't had a single issue. Now, we host mysql, redis, nextjs and an go api server on the same vps under one docker network and it's actually performing better for half the price lol

[@gambomaster]

It seems it is easier to build a SAAS these days than hosting and running it using servers.😂😂😂

[@AnthonySistilli]

hahaha.

[@denisgithinji1119]

I clicked like after you said "I hate AWS" 😅 Honestly don't even get why people keep praising this UNREASONABLY hard-to-use service

[@AnthonySistilli]

Yup!!

[@kieronwiltshire1701]

ver-cel

[@AnthonySistilli]

versul?

[@jredd46]

Obviously doesn’t setup proper connection timeouts and then gets upset when they have to pay for their own architecture choices…

[@AnthonySistilli]

we used the default 30s timeouts, which is proper since some requests do take near that long (rare)

[@hoteny]

I hope they contact you after seeing this video? Nah? Yeah probably not gonna see it even.

[@AnthonySistilli]

hahaha

[@HideBuz]

Or you get a VPS for 50 dollars with umetrered traffic and don't give a shit how the ddos you. Real devs go Baremetal.

[@ridabrahim7604]

I think you should pay figma if you're actually making money, i appreciate the honesty but creating many projects in a page that is meant for one project is bad

[@metaltyphoon]

This is such a copy of HLTV lol

[@AnthonySistilli]

Yep! Pretty much all the top val sites are - it's what the FPS community was most acustomed to - we actually had a unique UI and pivoted towards HLTV layout since it's what ppl wanted

[@metaltyphoon]

@@AnthonySistilli makes sense, no need to reinvent much on something that you know works. CS player since 1999 btw 😂

[@AnthonySistilli]

@@metaltyphoon ayyy hahaha