Question: How much $USD do I have to put down to get started?

[cha0s]

I'm currently investigating the feasibility of ripping out all of the paid stuff but I was curious about the real dollar amount you have to commit to deploying this stack?

[kentcdodds]

You should be able to deploy a simple app with this and fit within the free tier of every service used

[cha0s]

I have to tell you, "should be able to" is a rather unsatisfying answer!

That said, I like this project and I'm eager to (attempt to) fork out the (hard requirement on) paid stuff.

Thanks for taking the time to answer and all the effort you've put into to make this cool thing!

[sergiodxa]

How many paid services does EpicStack uses tho? Sentry is optional, GitHub OAuth is free.

Are AWS S3 and Resend the only paid ones? I suppose you can easily change from S3 to file disk if that's ok for the project, and for the Resend it's centralized in a single sendEmail function so any change from Resend to another option would be done in a single place.

[cha0s]

Sure, that and fly, which seems to be a core of deployment (and also has assumptions embedded e.g. trust proxy) :)

I can respect that it's probably not a whole lot of money (er, for a first-world-er) but I think it's an altogether fair question.

[sergiodxa]

Yeah it would be great if it could be used 100% free, but paying for file storage, email delivery and hosting are usually the 3 most basic ones you will have to pay anyway as you typically don't want to store files in file disk of your deployed app, you want to use an email delivery to not get into spam of everyone and you need somewhere to host it (unless you own servers).

Everything else should be (and is) optional.

[cha0s]

Neither of us is going to convince each other of who is "right" because we're both right in our own ways :P

I was just wondering if there was an actual, quantifiable resource for knowing what running this costs.

[anton-g]

To answer your question you’d need to provide details like expected number of users/amount of traffic, emails sent, how many and big files are uploaded etc etc. Without those details it’s an impossible question. I host multiple apps based on epic-stack for free, but none of them have massive amounts of usage.

[cha0s]

I appreciate that! That's pretty much what I was hoping for: someone actually using this that weighs in on your actual costs. Thank you!

But yeah, I would start with:

• 0 traffic
• 0 emails
• 0 files

The answer seems to be "free" (at least for now), which is good!

[cha0s]

Just a little update.

I deployed the epic stack on fly.io yesterday and it has been running for about 24 hours.

My dashboard says my usage so far is $0.15. If you multiply that by 30 days that comes out to $4.50, which is just under the $5 that I am under the impression (but cannot yet verify) that they will forgive. Most information about this seems to apply to older accounts and not newly created ones.

Keep in mind, this is an app with 0 users and 0 traffic. I just deployed it as a test so I could bring you the tea.

[kentcdodds]

I should probably mention that staying free is not a priority for this project. The priority is making great user experiences with a foundation that scales and adapts to real world production applications. Perhaps it would be useful for me to add this as an explicit guiding principle: https://github.com/epicweb-dev/epic-stack/blob/main/docs/guiding-principles.md

[cha0s]

Making that explicit seems like a good idea, to me anyway :)

I think a lot of people will assume that it's libre + gratis. Or maybe that's just me at this point. I ono.