Managing Cloud Costs for a Bootstrapped Startup

Cloud costs can kill a bootstrapped startup. We learned this the hard way.

The Early Mistake

First month on GCP: $800. For a product making $0.

We had over-provisioned everything, left monitoring running 24/7, and stored logs forever. Classic startup waste.

What We Fixed

Right-Sized Compute: Moved from n1-standard-4 to e2-medium instances. Performance barely changed. Cost dropped 70%.

Storage Optimization: Set lifecycle policies on Cloud Storage. Deleted old logs. Moved cold data to Nearline.

Scheduled Scaling: Dev and staging environments shut down at night. No one's testing at 2 AM anyway.

Database Tuning: Switched from Cloud SQL to a self-managed Postgres on Compute Engine. More work, less cost.

Current Setup

Production: 2x e2-medium instances, load balanced Database: 1x e2-standard-2 with automated backups Storage: ~100GB across buckets with lifecycle management

Total: ~$180/month for infrastructure serving 50+ businesses.

The Trade-Off

We spend more engineering time managing infrastructure. But at our stage, that's cheaper than spending money we don't have.

As we scale, this calculus will change. For now, it works.