Appendix A - Tools

Tools#

Hosting#

• Vultr - Hunter’s favorite infrastructure provider; fairly simple (you can get normal Linux servers), but with options to scale
• Hetzner - Another infrastructure provider that isn’t as complex as AWS
• Fly.io - Deploy containers and scale them down to 0 or up to millions of requests

Infrastructure#

• TailScale - Free VPN for up to 100 devices and 3 users, making it easier to have devices talking to each other
• Ngrok and LocalXpose - reverse proxies that allow you to make localhost available to the internet
• Pocketbase and Supabase - backend-as-a-service that let you focus on building features (Also, if you’re using Supabase, I recommend giving this article a read)
• Dokku - deploy your code on push
• Coolify - FOSS Vercel

Monitoring#

• Prometheus - FOSS metrics and alerting
• Grafana - logs, graphs, and other observability of your applications, with FOSS versions available

Analytics#

• PostHog - Analytics, Feature Flags, AB Testing, and more to help you make more data-driven decisions
• HotJar - Heatmaps and Recordings to help you look at your users’ behavior

Development Tools#

• Mailpit - Test email and SMTP without needing an actual email server or account
• Docker and Docker Compose - Remove (most) “works on my machine”, and as a bonus, make it work the same as in prod, too
• Minio - S3-compatible, locally-runnable object storage

Prototyping#

• My JSON Server – turn a JSON file in your repo into a fake API.
• JSON Placeholder API - a preset fake API that can be used to grab data quickly.