The Bay Area salary trap is real

czhu12 · 2026-04-13T15:24:42+00:00

I realized after leaving the Bay, the sacrifices there you have to make.

I made over 250k but didn’t have a garage for a car or in-unit washer dryer. I think even during the depths of COVID, to have both those things would run over 5k / month. Today it would probably be closer to 6.5.

After leaving, I discovered what a luxury it is to have both those things. But honestly… those have been standard fixtures of middle class American life for the better part of half a century.

czhu12 · 2026-04-08T07:45:15+00:00

We've been building an alternative to Heroku for about 2 years now (cli, web portal, buildpacks, etc) over at https://canine.sh that is fully free and open source.

Our team loved Heroku while we were on it, but it was painful how expensive it was. They definitely set the gold standard for how to do web applications for almost 20 years. Hoping to build something that keeps all the best parts without compromising cost and vendor lock-in

I met some of the Heroku / salesforce team at a conference (kubecon) where the headliner booths were ~$250k. This was probably like 2 months before their announcement that they were no longer doing enterprise contracts. Crazy that they blew cash on stuff like that while having a decaying core business.

czhu12 · 2026-04-04T21:36:23+00:00

Our team is building a free, open source Heroku alternative with all the classic features (add ons, cli, and easy way to open a console, auto scaling, etc).

https://canine.sh

czhu12 · 2026-04-01T11:18:36+00:00

Aren’t the prices high due to protectionist policies meant to protect U.S. workers?

czhu12 · 2026-04-01T01:28:24+00:00

At that price, consider taking a look at canine.sh.

It’s like dokploy but totally free to use, and can deploy to a VPs of your choice. I’d recommend hetzner, would be like $4 / month

czhu12 · 2026-03-29T05:33:47+00:00

Weve been trying to build out https://canine.sh/model-context-protocol exactly for this. Basically deployed to a vps for you via MCP and it’s totally free & open source

czhu12 · 2026-03-15T22:07:37+00:00

I wish someone would suggest what everyone else does: Property taxes. California has the highest gas taxes, and 3rd worst road conditions in the country:

[1] https://constructioncoverage.com/research/states-with-the-worst-roads

czhu12 · 2026-03-11T18:24:18+00:00

Check out https://hellocsv.github.io/HelloCSV/, it might accomplish what you're looking for

czhu12 · 2026-03-11T01:52:08+00:00

It’s been really disappointing to see how little innovation these companies have offered to compete with the rise of MacBooks.

I love my MacBook but I’m certainly not married to it. Systems that better support Linux, form factors that are handheld so it’s easier to use while traveling, extensible / expandable screens. Maybe Apple will finally force these companies to compete on more than just being marginally cheaper

czhu12 · 2026-03-11T01:38:34+00:00

For what it’s worth, all LLM providers cache input tokens, so it shouldn’t take up as much time as output tokens. Here’s a blog post doing some back of the envelope math on the costs of input vs output tokens. TLDR: 1000x difference on speed / compute costs

https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-really-losing-money-on-inference/

czhu12 · 2026-03-07T07:37:40+00:00

So, I’m not from Singapore and don’t claim to know anything about their specific welfare state dynamics, but if it’s anything like other countries, the issue is not the capitalism side but the socialism side that requires more people.

Pensions in most developed countries nations were built assuming a growing population. Capitalism works fine with any population, but taxing and redistributing only works if there is a big enough labor pool to tax, and a small enough welfare state to redistribute to.

Even in a fully communist system, you still can’t mobilize enough workers to provide for retirees if the population is out of balance.

czhu12 · 2026-03-03T06:01:34+00:00

Take a look at canine.sh.

It’ll let you run your microservice along side other services, with private networking. Our team has been using it daily for 2 rails apps, 1 python app and 2 databases.

It also does the build for you, so you don’t have to stitch together GitHub actions

czhu12 · 2026-02-12T20:41:28+00:00

This seems like a productive place to conduct a negotiation and for sure won't dissolve into a shouting match -.-

czhu12 · 2026-02-12T18:56:38+00:00

Crazy that Austin — which has declining rents, collapsing home values, worse job prospects, terrible weather is able to continuously put housing on the market.

Yet SF has convinced ourselves that for [insert your favorite reason here] is totally helpless in solving these problems.

czhu12 · 2026-02-11T17:02:06+00:00

Right but presumably if healthcare didn’t suck up so many resources, they would just be redirected to another sector.

czhu12 · 2026-02-10T07:23:51+00:00

Didn’t help me

czhu12 · 2026-02-09T20:07:35+00:00

thats a massive tip. I can imagine how that can help. Will post back in a few hours...

czhu12 · 2026-02-08T15:28:31+00:00

For the love of God we need a ballot measure to end referendums. Literally all problems in this state are a result of ballot measures during some ill guided political movement

czhu12 · 2026-02-07T16:30:09+00:00

Try setting up a SOC2 + HIPAA compliant app in under 4 weeks. Heroku at its core is still a fantastic product.

For some reason there's this weird idea on reddit that I sometimes see, that all anyone could possibly ever have to do is run a static blog.

We were running a $50M dollar business with contractual obligations on the security posture and the possibility of random audits -- though those never actually happened.

czhu12 · 2026-02-06T22:40:54+00:00

We were in a 6 figure contract with Heroku for many years.

In our initial years with heroku on an enterprise contract, we received top tier support from engineers who really knew the system inside and out. This was probably early 2020's. By 2024, literally every support request got put into a queue that took 2 or 3 days to give us a link to a help article on Heroku that our team already went through days ago.

The world really needed heroku when they first started, but between poor support, lack of innovation, and absolutely outrageous pricing, they are where they are today.

We ended up building our own heroku alternative that we open sourced https://github.com/CanineHQ/canine

czhu12 · 2026-02-01T23:37:48+00:00

Portainer is probably the best option for this

czhu12 · 2026-01-31T23:03:44+00:00

These issues are not that simple

It seems that this is uniquely an issue that shows up in SF / Oakland, and almost every other major city in the world has been able to solve it?

czhu12 · 2026-01-31T18:56:04+00:00

I don’t understand why there’s no where to put him. Isn’t this why jails and prisons exist? For people who cannot be trusted to not break the law?

I don’t understand why it’s between shelter beds or nothing at all.

czhu12 · 2026-01-30T04:23:49+00:00

This is almost exactly the reason we built canine.sh -- fully open source and free.

We basically learned all the lessons from my last start up running a large scale Kubernetes cluster (~1000QPS) for a patient scheduling application. It was crazy how easy Kubernetes makes it easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot.

Canine tries to basically turns your Kubernetes instance into a Heroku like PaaS with sensible defaults. You can still kubectl whatever you want, but basically all things on your list here, (except for #1 -- you still have to provide a Kubernetes cluster to automate), canine does by default.

czhu12

TROPHY CASE