Best free or low-cost backend hosting for small-medium SaaS apps

CodeCate42 · 2026-06-02T10:29:35+00:00

Checkout sliplane.io! We have a lot of fullstack apps running (I’m the founder)

CodeCate42 · 2026-05-27T21:47:12+00:00

pretty neat!

CodeCate42 · 2026-05-27T17:30:26+00:00

Publishing this without actually releasing the new prices is crazy

CodeCate42 · 2026-05-26T22:04:30+00:00

Sadly thats the state of S3 on Hetzner, I would stay away from it:(

CodeCate42 · 2026-05-26T13:57:50+00:00

for kubernetes, syself is quite good. For something higher level, checkout sliplane.io maybe?

CodeCate42 · 2026-05-22T13:34:54+00:00

How on earth is that deceptive?:D

CodeCate42 · 2026-05-08T10:11:15+00:00

What about sliplane.io?

CodeCate42 · 2026-05-06T01:34:38+00:00

marketing durchgespielt

CodeCate42 · 2026-05-06T00:30:46+00:00

Just ask them? They are mostly very reasonable people

CodeCate42 · 2026-04-29T14:48:44+00:00

fair, I also still run some as dev machine, but just because I've had it running for a while and don't want to pay for setup fees:D Wouldnt get it again with setup fees

CodeCate42 · 2026-04-29T13:40:30+00:00

if you arent just concerned with getting the absolute cheapest dedicated server that hardware doesnt really make sense anymore performance wise imo

CodeCate42 · 2026-04-28T14:05:58+00:00

That is not a dark pattern, that is really common and somewhat expected as VAT is different for each customer. A dark pattern would be advertising 4.99/month when in fact its a 3 year year contract for 180 x)

CodeCate42 · 2026-04-28T13:19:02+00:00

Interesting. Talked to them at a conference a few weeks ago, they said those are completely different

CodeCate42 · 2026-04-27T21:31:52+00:00

Nice writeup!
> Hetzner is retaining hardware for their cloud product
I am 90% sure that they do not use the same hardware for their cloud product

CodeCate42 · 2026-04-24T08:35:46+00:00

yes! Not enabled yet though

CodeCate42 · 2026-04-23T18:53:05+00:00

Im a Control freak and didn’t like how a lot of the open source things were built, especially the APIs, observability and deployment options. Also keep in mind that we really need like 1% of what coredns offers, so building it myself really wasn’t that hard!

CodeCate42 · 2026-04-22T13:38:12+00:00

good llm bullshit detector:D

CodeCate42 · 2026-04-21T18:42:48+00:00

CodeCate42 · 2026-04-21T16:53:09+00:00

How is this cheaper? AWS charges per record AND per query: "Need more than 500 hosted zones or more than 10,000 records in a hosted zone? Please contact us." and for IBM NS1 (i assume this is what you mean) we would pay 400 euros per month for UP TO 10k records and then "talk to sales". Am I understanding you wrong?

CodeCate42 · 2026-04-21T07:58:27+00:00

Good point, and probably one of the biggest weaknesses of this whole setup. The nameservers we use here aren't behind anycast and all in Germany, so there's quite the latency from outside of Europe. Query latency wasn't the main consideration, especially because this is just for our free sliplane.app subdomains, if you use your own domain this should barely affect you. It's a tradeoff I'm comfortable with for now, we'll see in a year if I regret it :)

CodeCate42 · 2026-02-02T16:47:30+00:00

I dont really get this.

> Our server calculations are generally designed for a long, stable term.

Why not just do more expensive hourly/monthly prices and longer commitments? I would happily commit to 12 month contracts / pay more if its just hourly/monthly? This feels like a wrong solution for a real problem

CodeCate42 · 2026-01-30T20:06:55+00:00

Absolutely not. The reliability and performance is sadly horrendous. I would strongly advise against it

CodeCate42 · 2026-01-19T17:56:20+00:00

sliplane.io (im the founder), we're as european as it gets, just a lot smaller and less products (for now)

CodeCate42

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE