question for anyone building apps with AI tools - where are you hosting? app, db, all of it. if it's railway / vercel / supabase etc - are you paying, or is the free tier enough? mostly curious what anyone paying for several services at once adds up to per month #BuildInPublic

launch day takeaway: the replies that weren't congrats were about the bill and where builds run. nobody asked about features. people want boring and predictable from infrastructure. #BuildInPublic

shipped lathe on product hunt today. app, db and auth on one machine, one flat bill. if you've ever stitched that stack together by hand, take a look: producthunt.com/products/lat… #BuildInPublic

free tier design is mostly deciding what you can afford to give away. half a vcpu, 1 gb ram, 10 gb disk - enough to run something real, small enough that sleeping machines cost almost nothing to keep around. idle users shouldn't be a bill. #BuildInPublic

lathe has a free tier now. half a vcpu, 1 gb ram, 10 gb disk. no card, never charged, one per person. it sleeps when you do. lathe.live #BuildInPublic

i'm building lathe and its distribution plan right now is this: show up in other people's replies with something worth reading, every day, until somebody clicks through. slow, but every conversation is real. #BuildInPublic

still hunting the first real customer. everything until then is rehearsal: the page tells the truth, the deploys time themselves, the boxes delete themselves. when someone finally pays, the machine underneath is already boring. #BuildInPublic

one paying customer who actually uses the thing beats a thousand launch impressions. usage asks questions your landing page never will: where the setup drags, which button lies, what the docs forgot. impressions are the sugar high. #BuildInPublic

published a comparison page against the default stack last night. hardest part was not writing it - it was deleting every number i could not back with a measured run. marketing brain says round up. but the one number you inflated is the one a reader will test first. #BuildInPublic

new page live: lathe vs the vercel + supabase stack - setup time, moving parts, and what deletes itself when you're done. written as a comparison, not a pitch. #BuildInPublic docs.lathe.live/guides/lathe…

landing page copy rule i keep re-learning: the page says what the product does today, not what the best run once did. mine says 5 minutes on average, end to end. when the average drops, the page changes - not before. #BuildInPublic

a new subscriber showed up in my dashboard yesterday. $15 plan, coupon checkout, then it was gone. took me a minute to remember: that is my own daily end-to-end test. a robot buys the product every day so the checkout flow gets exercised by something that is not a paying customer. the boring tests are the ones that let you sleep. #BuildInPublic

friday: 5 failed jobs in 24 hours. saturday: zero. 7 boxes running right now, every one deleting itself on schedule. the scoreboard does not take weekends off. boring is the goal. #BuildInPublic

the friday numbers post did more than any feature post this week: two builders I had never talked to read the tiny scoreboard and turned into real conversations. nobody trusts a launch. everybody trusts a receipt. #BuildInPublic

friday numbers, because posting them keeps me honest: 6 boxes running right now. 1 trial in progress. $50 in revenue in the last 30 days. tiny, but every number is real - and every box still deletes itself when it should. #BuildInPublic

listed Lathe on LaunchFree this week. the unexpected part: the value was not the listing. it was being forced to write the one-liner - what it is, who it is for, why it exists - tight enough for a stranger. backlinks are a bonus. clarity is the asset. #BuildInPublic

small distribution win: Lathe is now listed on LaunchFree. nobody warns you that half of being a solo founder is showing up in directories. launchfree.io/listings/lathe… #BuildInPublic

day 4 of the morning ritual: 4 for 4 green. checkout-to-running across all runs: 3m36s to 5m31s. deletes always clean, zero stuck resources since saturday. $0 spent - every machine deletes itself after the check. boring is the goal. #BuildInPublic

the thing that's broken two mornings running? our own analytics container. the dashboard that tells me if users show up can't get itself out of bed. there's a metaphor in there but i'll find it after i close issue #492. #BuildInPublic