The Game of Credits

Building a product not only requires much work but planning if you --

1. are working Solo
2. have no funding
3. are searching for Mentors
4. and for a Co-Founders

In this newsletter, I will detail what credits I got and which tool and product I use to build my product. In the end, I will share a short demo of the product which is being built as part of building in public.

Tech Stack with available credits

Free Tools and Products

1. TypeScript
2. NextJs 14 - Frontend and Backend
3. Other backend services -- Node.js with Express/Hono
4. UI Components: Tailwind Labs CSS along with Aceternity UI, shadcn/ui
5. Icons: Lucid React
6. Turborepo as code management
7. Harness -- Free version is good enough for the Build and Deployment of services
8. PostHog -- Complete analytics suite. The free tier is good enough for now
9. Notion -- Documentation

Credits I have for Tools and Products

1. DigitalOcean - $25k credits. Using for deploying - MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, CDN Caching, Functions
2. Amazon Web Services (AWS) - $10k credits. Using for K8S deployment, notification and Kafka and Redis cache for some services. Also caching for backend service via CloudFront
3. Google Cloud - $2k credits. Used for early translation. Rest will be used for YouTube APIs
4. Algolia - $10k credits. One-stop solution for all the searching-related solutions
5. Linear - 6 months free. I will be switching to paid next month. Forget Jira, this is the best project management tool available.
6. Datadog - $100k credits. Everything for the monitoring of the product.
7. Anthropic - $500 credits. Using the API for categorisation of Creators
8. OpenAI - $2.5k credits. Using for translation, categorisation and sub-categorisation of Creators
9. GitHub - 1-year enterprise license. Best tool as a code repository
10. Clerk.com - 50% discount. This can go under but I have a discount for a year with 10k MAUs as free. Decided to go with the Clerk for authentication to provide the best solution with minimal work.
11. Stripe - 1-year free. Everything related to payment
12. Mercury - Banking solution

Paying for Tools and Products

1. Vercel - For the deployment of the product and edge caching
2. Resend - Everything related to emails
3. Cloudflare - Firewall and protection
4. Stripe Atlas - $500 paid. Company registration

Progress so far

As MVP development is in progress -- a little slower than I had anticipated. At least, now I do not have to worry about running the servers and applications for a year. Sharing a short demo of the product built to date.

In the meantime, I am looking for a co-founder to join the team as most of the accelerators have an unsaid rule of having a team. Feel free to connect with me if you want to know more or discuss the product that I am building.

#ratecreator