| ▲ | matebajusz 12 hours ago | |
I've been hosting one of my side projects on AWS. The project actually did quite well for a while, generating a few thousand euros per month. Then COVID hit, regulations changed, and the problem it solved basically disappeared overnight. Revenue dropped to zero, the startup credits I received held out for quite some time, after that I kept the project running, paying out of pocket, thinking maybe it would recover. The hosting costs were reasonable for my salary. Then one day, after ignoring a few AWS emails, I got hit with a charge on my card that was orders of magnitude higher than usual. "WTF?" I logged in immediately to investigate. No DDoS. No misconfiguration. Then I checked the billing page: *RDS PostgreSQL “legacy fee” — ~€200* for March Apparently, I hadn’t upgraded from Postgres 13 to 16. That was it. I had been paying ~€25/month for RDS, and suddenly there’s a €200 charge for essentially… not upgrading. That was the moment it clicked for me: Why am I running this in the cloud? I had a spare Raspberry Pi at home. For my use case, I just needed something that runs reliably. So I moved everything to self-hosting. And immediately ran into a different set of problems: Deployments were manual (SSH → pull → restart). Debugging required logging into the machine every time. Monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana) was too heavy for small devices. So I started building a small agent for myself. It began as a deployment tool, but gradually evolved into something more: - deploy apps from GitHub or Docker automatically - self-healing processes with restart logic - system metrics + lightweight monitoring - *heartbeats so I know if a device/service is actually alive* - *log forwarding so I don’t have to SSH in to debug* - reverse tunnels (I use it for Home Assistant instead of Nabu Casa) - remote terminal access from the browser I named it Beacon. It’s open source, and I’ve been running it for the last ~8 months. Everything runs locally on the device (Pi, mini PC, etc.) but there is an optional beaconinfra.dev integration — mainly for monitoring, Home Assistant (or other local app) tunnel, and remote access. I host beaconinfra myself too, and since then I moved away from the Pi to an N100. | ||