He Runs Four Paid SaaS Apps on One Server for $45 a Month
What It Costs to Run 4 Apps on My Own Servers
I run four products with paying customers, background workers, and real databases on a single self-managed box for about $45 a month. The same setup on managed platforms would cost $360 to $960. The catch is real: backups, deploys, security, and monitoring all become my job. Here's the full bill, what broke along the way, and when you shouldn't bother.
Until you've restored a backup, you don't have backups. You have files.