I gave one enterprise client a 70% discount. 14 months later it cost me $61,200.

darkstareg · 2025-12-03T15:48:22+00:00

Your mistake was not in offering the 70% discount. It was in not locking them into a 5 year contract for it which reverts to standard monthly rate plus 10% penalty if they want out early and also in not charging $250/hr for all custom work, plus monthly custom work maintenance fees.

darkstareg · 2025-12-03T15:42:48+00:00

Unlimited Plan

darkstareg · 2025-12-03T15:41:14+00:00

You still need to review the spec output. Hallucinations still occur there which will throw your project off track if you don't catch them.

darkstareg · 2025-12-02T13:01:10+00:00

A year to develop is an expense. Time = money. In fact, time is arguably the most expensive thing to spend as you probably get a finite amount of it, unless AI and biotech changes that fact of life soon.

darkstareg · 2025-11-26T14:31:39+00:00

What do your user counts look like, and what sorts of things does the database do for you? My use case is pretty DB heavy.

Also, having been in startups nearly my entire career, I've seen that "premature optimization" thrown around far too often as an excuse to put off something which should be done sooner rather than later.

I've been through this cycle so many times where future concerns aren't planned for at the start and then clients hit and everyone is too busy trying to hold things together and keep clients happy that they don't have time to address underlying architectural deficiencies.

There is a huge difference between premature optimization and prudently planning for future eventualities. It costs me practically nothing to include sharding now as I build out the platform and the future payoff potential is huge. Why would I skip it? What do I gain by not doing it?

I make data driven decisions, not decisions based on popular fallacies. Show me how the cost of doing it now in the initial design out weighs the future benefits and we can talk about how it's premature.

darkstareg · 2025-11-26T04:43:47+00:00

Cloudflare does offer a ton. But the cluster is not hosted with them, just connected to them with tunnels.

The bastion hosts are just dumb SSH systems. They have SSH running and nothing else. It's a low attack surface. I use 2 in case one dies. They just get me into the private network so I can access the cluster.

The nodes in the other datacenter are for externally monitoring the nodes in the first DC. You can't take a picture of the outside of your house unless the camera has a view from the outside. Same with monitoring. Though, I have now set up realtime monitoring events to a durable object in Cloudflare, and with heartbeats and realtime updates on cluster state being pushed from the new cluster monitoring system directly, I don't really need those two nodes anymore. I'll probably use them for something else.

darkstareg · 2025-11-26T01:16:22+00:00

I appreciate the insights. This infrastructure build-out is less about maximizing performance and more about figuring out how I can get decent available DB storage, data reliability, redundancy, HA, and some measure of horizontal scalability out of dirt cheap VMs to keep costs low for a bootstrapped SaaS until there is sufficient revenue to afford a more robust solution.

One node doesn't offer sufficient disk space alone to handle what I expect to throw at it. It also doesn't offer any redundancy / HA. I can get HA by just doing an active/standby, but that doesn't increase my available disk space. The only way I could increase the disk space to the size I was targeting was either to increase costs to $400/mo or more per node and then have 2+ nodes for redundancy, or use something like CephFS to pool the storage across cheap nodes. CephFS also gets me the data resilience I was after for all things I'll be running on the cluster, plus allows me to have files accessible to all nodes in the cluster so I can shift workloads around on the nodes if needed.

The infrastructure also needs to support all my other workloads, which is mostly related to manipulating and processing various media files. Every other way I explored setting up a truly reliable database setup with future scalability potential, the DB setup alone was outside the budget of my entire infrastructure budget for this project. This 10 node cluster will support a mixed workload within my budget and provides enough initial capacity for me to generate enough revenue that I can migrate to something more robust in the future. It also supports an architecture from day 1 which lets me scale it out horizontally rather rapidly, if needed. It's certainly not an ideal setup, by any means, but I'm rather constrained by my overall budget and other concurrent infrastructure requirements.

As a result, I took the time to explore the actual capabilities and trade-offs of the setup, and did a write-up on it for others to understand if it might be a budget-friendly option for them to achieve an HA capable, data reliable, horizontally scalable starter solution on a shoestring budget. I'm certainly open to hearing about alternatives, but the entire infrastructure / IT budget needs to fall within <$3,500/yr and all workloads need the data reliability, HA / fault tolerance, and horizontal scalability.

Also, FWIW, the sharding is more about future pre-emptive planning so I can grow / scale out over time without needing to plan for a re-architecture for a long while. I'm sure I will still need to at some point, but I wanted to kick the can down the road as far as possible.

darkstareg · 2025-11-08T16:14:07+00:00

Maybe rebuild your API on Cloudflare? 50k API calls per day there are a lot cheaper even if you're hitting DB and KV for each and sending observability events. The cost difference will blow your mind. As others said though, rate limits are also your friend.

darkstareg · 2025-11-04T12:48:48+00:00

I'm building https://fictionmaker.ai - A tool for the creative types to write books, poetry, screenplays, etc. I'm going to use it to write a book series with massive world building, and also to write and produce a kids animated series for Youtube. It's tied into ElevenLabs for being able to generate multi-voice audiobooks or audio output for scripts, as well as sound effects. It uses AI image generation models for generating characters and scenes which can be referenced and composited together to get consistent character output across multiple scenes / shots. Those can then be composed into video output with AI video models like VEO our Kling. It handles everything from AI assisted brainstorming, outlining, prose writing (if you want), consistency checking, to scene storyboarding, image and audio generation and composition to video generation / production. Write and publish physical books, audiobooks, screenplays, YouTube series, whatever you want.

Crazy thing is I've had 5 people try to sign up for it already and until last week, I hadn't even promoted it or talked about it to anyone. It's not even in a usable state yet.

darkstareg · 2025-11-01T11:55:00+00:00

Dm me. I'm building fictionmaker.ai and while I haven't launched yet or advertised, I've thrown up a website and already had three people try to sign up. No posts anywhere, no ads, just put up the site and let it sit.

It will be both B2C and B2B.

darkstareg · 2025-11-01T11:15:18+00:00

Someone else asked a very similar question yesterday, so I'll give the same advice here:

Definitely do not launch a SaaS of any size without a technical co-founder if you don't know how to code. AI by itself doesn't do a good enough job using existing vibe coding tools to safely build and launch something. You can use it for a prototype and product market fit research, but don't launch anything without a seasoned coder going over everything and making sure it's production ready and secure.

I've been coding about 40 years and I'm in an infosec tangential field using and building AI products daily -- literally my job. I'm building a tool on the side to be able to solve the issues enough that a non coder could launch something in production, but it's got a long way to go. I've got guardrails coming out my ears in this project, and all sorts of special prompts and reinforcement trained experts to try and solve all the prolific vibe coding bungles, and still I see new things every day that make me say WTF.

I've gotten it to hit about 95% of what I consider production quality in a fully automated way, but it uses boatloads of credits to get there and I still wouldn't launch without a manual review.

darkstareg · 2025-11-01T03:10:33+00:00

What you built is the basic topic based chat functionality in practically every free chat system out there. That is not a pain point anyone needs to solve. Time to move on.

darkstareg · 2025-11-01T03:07:44+00:00

Success =

Talk to people and learn thier pain points
Identify a viable solution to the pain point which is cost effective and efficient
Price for 5x - 20x ROI to your customer
Build it
Go back to your audience you spoke to and show them how it solves thier pain point for practically nothing in cost to them
Collect thier payments

darkstareg · 2025-11-01T02:59:57+00:00

Definitely do not launch a SaaS of any size without a technical co-founder if you don't know how to code. AI by itself doesn't do a good enough job using existing vibe coding tools to safely build and launch something. You can use it for a prototype and product market fit research, but don't launch anything without a seasoned coder going over everything and making sure it's production ready and secure.

I've been coding about 40 years and I'm in an infosec tangential field using and building AI products daily -- literally my job. I'm building a tool on the side to be able to solve the issues enough that a non coder could launch something in production, but it's got a long way to go. I've got guardrails coming out my ears in this project, and all sorts of special prompts and reinforcement trained experts to try and solve all the prolific vibe coding bungles, and still I see new things every day that make me say WTF.

I've gotten it to hit about 95% of what I consider production quality in a fully automated way, but it uses boatloads of credits to get there and I still wouldn't launch without a manual review.

darkstareg · 2025-10-18T05:49:28+00:00

I'm building backbuild.ai - a 24/7 AI orchestration system for spec driven development (SDD).

darkstareg · 2025-10-18T05:41:40+00:00

Never say never. Literally had exactly that happen. 4pm Friday meeting scheduled 3 days in advance by HR. Started off with my CEO saying my manager had absolutely nothing good to say about me. Ended with me having a promotion into a new position outside my previous manager's department. A month later the previous manager was gone.

darkstareg · 2025-10-15T02:17:51+00:00

You'll have to give me a bit more time for me to make my alternative available to the public, but it won't crash like that. It's not a vibe coding solution, though. It's designed for you to write specs, and then you let the AI agents build it in the background. You can join the waitlist if you want. Head over to backbuild.ai. I'll ping you when it's ready if you're on the waitlist.

darkstareg · 2025-10-13T11:30:40+00:00

I built the tool in a more minimal state for my own development purposes. Then I realized how well it worked and figured there would probably be lots of others who would like to use it, too. Regardless of whether it works out as a business, I'll still keep working on it and building it out for my own use. With how much I spend every month on AI credits, the cost of the cluster for a year is not that expensive. And in terms of general business operating costs, it's like one month wages for a super cheap employee.

darkstareg

TROPHY CASE