[Real Experience] Auditing My Indie SaaS Subscriptions: 5 Alternatives That Cut $800/Year
Auditing My Indie SaaS Subscriptions: 5 Alternatives That Cut $800/Year TL;DR Fixed costs for indie dev projects balloon through "subscriptions you signed up for and forgot." I switched 5 services to free tiers or self-hosted alternatives, cutting ¥10,000/month — ¥120,000/year (roughly $800). The short version: Before Monthly After Monthly Annual Savings Heroku Hobby (2 dynos + DB) ¥2,800 Fly.io / Railway free tier ¥0 ¥33,600 Vercel Pro ¥3,000 Cloudflare Pages ¥0 ¥36,000 Datadog (1 host) ¥2,300 Grafana Cloud Free ¥0 ¥27,600 Mailgun Foundation ¥1,400 Resend free tier ¥0 ¥16,800 Algolia Build overage ¥500 Meilisearch (self-host) ¥0 ¥6,000 At indie-project traffic levels, you're probably using less than 10% of what paid plans offer. The first step is auditing your usage and checking whether your actual numbers fit inside a free tier. The Approach: Measure First, Decide Second Cut decisions should be based on real data, not gut feeling. Start with a billing audit. # Export each service's plan and recent usage to a spreadsheet # Example: check request count for the last 30 days from nginx access log awk '{print $4}' access.log | grep -c " $( date +%d/%b/%Y ) " # → A few thousand requests/day fits comfortably inside almost every SaaS free tier The key is looking at actual traffic , not peak spikes. Most indie projects fit well within Vercel/Cloudflare free tiers (100k requests/month to unlimited bandwidth). Step-by-Step Migration 1. Hosting: Heroku → Fly.io # Deploy to fly.io — existing Dockerfile or buildpacks work as-is curl -L https://fly.io/install.sh | sh fly launch # interactively generates fly.toml fly deploy fly scale count 1 # 1 instance is enough for indie projects fly postgres create # small instance, effectively free The key to cost control: lock to fly scale count 1 and the minimum VM ( shared-cpu-1x ). 2. Frontend: Vercel Pro → Cloudflare Pages Unlimited bandwidth, generous build limits, and free equivalents of Pro features (Analytics, etc.) that most indie