Build in Public: Ensembl #5 - Free Services To Keep Costs Low
Say hello to my new best friends, Vercel and Supabase.
When building a company or app, you want enterprise-level services at the lowest possible cost, especially in the beginning.
There’s nothing cheaper than free.
Every web app needs hosting so that people can access and use it, and if you want to manipulate data, you’ll need a database. Hosting and databases are indispensable when building software solutions online.
You then need to consider scalability. What if your website goes from getting 1 view a week to 1 million? The answer to this problem is choosing a Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud provider like Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure to handle this responsibility, so you don’t have to.
However, they cost money.
I’m at the beginning of this journey and want to keep costs as low as possible.
It didn’t take much Googling before I found Vercel and Supabase for startups. Although they offer paid subscriptions, their free tiers are supa generous (see what I did there?).
Vercel
This is the hosting service I’m currently using for https://enesmbl.uk—completely free!
What I like most about this service is its integration with GitHub. Whenever I push to my main branch, it takes the latest code and deploys the newest version of the website, creating a CI/CD pipeline.
Again, completely free!
My website is simple, but many popular companies such as Notion, Sonos, Twilio, and more use Vercel.
Supabase
Supabase is an open-source alternative to Firebase by Google.
You can host this yourself, or you can host with Supabase, again utilising their very generous free tier.
If an app needs to save data, then it needs a database.
What I love about this service, aside from the price, is the automatically built API to retrieve the data. Simply build your database, and then, without any extra effort, you can serve your web app.
I use this service in multiple products. One example is capturing emails when people join our waiting list for Ensembl.
Thanks for reading!
Jordan
