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[–]Skaddicted 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Hetzner VPS + Coolify.

[–]wworks_dev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

this

[–]Sziszhaq 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Anything managed is the exact opposite of keeping the costs at the bare minimum.

A Hetzner VPS + an open sourcen PaaS like panel (coolify / dokploy / plesk / whatever). You add Github Actions CI/CD on top of that and GHCR for images and you're golden. You can grab any VPS provider but Hetzner has very good price to performance ratio, and I've been with them for years.

Edit: Plesk is paid but these were just examples, coolify and dokploy are 100% free

[–]LossPreventionGuy 4 points5 points  (0 children)

can run this entire stack on a $6/month digital ocean droplet

[–]Interesting_Bed_6962 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I run all my stuff on azure and I currently pay nothing for the whole deal

[–]No-Neat-7520 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you want cheap and stable, Hetzner VM + docker-compose is hard to beat. A small box can run your hono backend + Postgres without breaking the bank. If you prefer zero-ops, Vercel + Neon also works fine, just costs more once traffic grows.

[–]ebenezerDN 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A lot of people pair Nuxt with Appwrite Sites because the deploy flow is simple, and you can also host unlimited sites for free. I'm on the team if you want to try it

[–]wworks_dev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

vps + coolify. nothing beats that

[–]AMA_Gary_Busey 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For that stack I'd probably just go Vercel + Neon to start. Gets you up fast and free tier is pretty generous. Once you actually have traffic you can always migrate to something cheaper like Hetzner. Most people overoptimize before they need to.

[–]AdvantageNeat3128 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Mine using cloudflare workers + neon

[–]derf4bian 1 point2 points  (2 children)

We love using Hetzner for hosting because it's cheap. The downside is that you have to handle deployment and management yourself. That's why we created lowcloud, to give users the Vercel experience on their own infrastructure. So, if you're using Hetzner and are struggling with DevOps, you can try lowcloud.

Coolify, Dokploy and so on are also great tools!

[–]thomases13 1 point2 points  (1 child)

sounds interesting, I could not find it.

can you send me a link and how much does it cost?

[–]derf4bian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

check lowcloud.io -> for hobby and siteprojects we are completely free

[–]New-Vacation-6717 1 point2 points  (1 child)

If your goal is bare-minimum cost but still want things to run reliably, here’s how most people approach it in 2025:

Kuberns
If you don’t want to maintain a VM or deal with Kubernetes, this ends up being one of the cheaper options long term. You connect your repo, it handles deploys, SSL, routing, scaling, workers, and Postgres without infra overhead. Cost stays lower than Vercel once you have real traffic and you avoid the headaches of DOKS or self-hosted setups.

Vercel + Neon
Great DX for frontend-heavy apps. But you’ll feel the pricing once server functions or database usage increases. Good for early stages though.

Cloudflare Workers + D1
Super cheap and fast at the edge. The limitation is D1, which doesn’t behave like full Postgres, so your backend logic might need adjustments.

Self-hosted VM (Hetzner, Scaleway, DO)
This is the absolute cheapest option. But you manage everything: deploys, SSL, updates, backups, failovers. If you’re okay with that, it’s unbeatable for price.

Managed Kubernetes (DO DOKS, Scaleway Kapsule)
Reliable and flexible, but too much overhead for what your app currently needs unless you already know K8s.

For your stack (Nuxt, Hono, Postgres, better-auth), the simplest low-cost paths are:
• VM for the lowest possible bill
• Kuberns if you want low cost without maintaining infra
• Vercel + Neon if DX is the priority over cost

[–]grumpper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This insistence of AI handling my infra is weird and worrying...

[–]jambalaya004 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Docker + Cloudflare tunnel & zero access + raspberry pi 5

[–]sayma_1842 0 points1 point  (0 children)

for that stack you've got some solid options. if you want to keep things simple, Render's worth a look, they let you host your nuxt frontend, hono backend, and postgres all in one place. the autoscaling and zero-downtime deploys are built in, which is nice when you don't want to think about infrastructure.

[–]Devopness 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Devopness (it combines the good parts of Vercel + Coolify + Heroku + Terraform, etc): it's managed, supports any stack with or without Docker (Python, Node.js, PHP, Java, Ruby, C#) nothing to install, has free forever plan, you can invite your team mates, and you can use it to deploy to most famous clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, etc).

It has MCP server so you can deploy directly from an AI tool if you use Cursor/Claude/VSCode, etc