I am a software developer with a full time job. My salary is not enough for me rely completely on job, and I cant take the risk of leaving my job and finding another one, because I live paycheck to paycheck and dont have any savings.
Lurking through buildinpublic and here on reddit, I feel like a loser.
I am comparatively good doing full stack development ( Nodejs, React etc ). Considering my strong and weak points I came up with following projects in 2 categories.
- Build some products My strong points are: I can spend time building projects, but I dont have money to buy servers or to launch them, minimum cost considering database and all would be around $100/month ( Coming from India, this amount is huge for me, Its approx 8000/month )
- Build design templates I can spend time learning about designs since, initial investment here is low ( cost of figma, framer ) and then sell templates which can eventually help me earn sustainable amount of money, But issue is, My design skills are complete zero. For example, I get confused when I want to decide colors, or fonts.
So which path I should spend my time on ?
if you register a llc or a pvt ltd in india (<10000), you should be eligible for credits by most cloud providers. so if servers are the only blocker for (1), this might solve it.
You can put everything on a cheap server, it’s really enough for a start.
I wrote a book on deployment if you need to learn some details https://deploymentfromscratch.com
And I put together a blog post how to run all on single VPS with Kamal https://nts.strzibny.name/deploying-rails-single-server-kamal/
Good luck!
You can keep the cost low by using the following techniques (I am using both):
- Use Next.js + MongoDB + Vercel (All free tier): If your apps can be 100% serverless, this will ideally give you a bill of $0/month.
Checkout Letters. I have been running it for two years now and paid $0 till date.
- Use a cheap $5/month droplet(VM) from Digital Ocean + MongoDB: If your apps need a long running server, this way you can keep the cost fixed.
Deploy all of your apps in the same VM and use Caddy for reverse proxy.
DM me if you need help.
I liked how detailed you wrote about your problems. Most of the users just write within 4/5 lines with no context.
However, you can start with making plugins and selling them on platform like codecanyon. No design skills are needed.