Real-world notes for founders navigating the messy road from idea to launched product.
"AWS S3 egress fees add up fast. Here's the real-world cost comparison between S3 and Cloudflare R2, when migration makes sense, and what breaks in the transition."
Understand the difference between frontend and backend development, why it matters for your startup, and how modern frameworks are changing the traditional separation.
Auth0's sales page shows "Free up to 7,500 active users." Six months later, you are paying $240/month for 3,200 users.
Vercel's serverless functions time out at 10 seconds on Hobby tier, 60 seconds on Pro. Your PDF generation takes 45 seconds. Your data sync runs for 5 minutes. Your batch email send processes 10,000 records over 8 minutes.
Firebase bills you $1,847 in month six for an app that costs $43 on Supabase. Same features, same user count, wildly different economics.
A founder texted me a screenshot of their Vercel bill: $347 for one month. Their app had 12,000 monthly active users and was still pre-revenue.
We built a startup's MVP on Bubble. Six months in, page loads hit 8 seconds. Customer support tickets tripled. The founder called us to rebuild it properly.
Your developer told you the database choice "depends on your data model." That is true but unhelpful.
SendGrid charged a client $180/month to send password resets and order confirmations. We migrated them to Resend. Same emails, same volume, $20/month.
