Chartbrew VS ExtPay

I'm working part-time on my project https://chartbrew.com

It's an open-source data visualization and reporting platform that I started in 2018, I abandoned in 2019, then resumed working on it more seriously in 2020.

Currently, the platform is doing $1,138 in MRR from then managed hosting service and has made over $11k in revenue so far. It's been growing steadily in the last few months but going through a rough Dec-Jan period at the moment. You can see the open page at https://chartbrew.com/open

Onwards and great job everyone at working to make side projects work for you!

Chartbrew (server): Chartbrew is open-source reporting service which really makes it easy to visualize data.

I did the same thing with Google Firebase for my herb garden! Also, if you want to chart data, Chartbrew is a great tool. I plan on doing this with a hanging drip wall as soon as my area has spring plants to buy!

Feel free to check it out here: https://github.com/chartbrew/chartbrew

There's an indie-hacker I follow building this: https://chartbrew.com/

From what I understand, it's more like an easier-to-use grafana, where you can build charts/graphs from different data sources.

I've been using SQLite/Litestream for https://extensionpay.com for about 3 years now! Serves about 120m requests per month (most of those are cached and don't hit the db), but it's been great!

I was convinced that SQLite could be a viable db option from this great post about it called Consider SQLite: https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite

Using SQLite with Litestream helped me to launch the site quickly without having to pay for or configure/manage a db server, especially when I didn't know if the site would make any money and didn't have any personal experience with running production databases. Litestream streams to blackblaze b2 for literally $0 per month which is great. I already had a backblaze account for personal backups and it was easy to just add b2 storage. I've never had to restore from backup so far.

There's a pleasing operational simplicity in this setup — one $14 DigitalOcean droplet serves my entire app (single-threaded still!) and it's been easy to scale vertically by just upgrading the server to the next tier when I started pushing the limits of a droplet (or doing some obvious SQLite config optimizations). DigitalOcean's "premium" intel and amd droplets use NVMe drives which seem to be especially good with SQLite.

One downside of using SQLite is that there's just not as much community knowledge about using and tuning it for web applications. For example, I'm using it with SvelteKit and there's not much written online about deploying multi-threaded SvelteKit apps with SQLite. Also, not many example configs to learn from. By far the biggest performance improvement I found was turning on memory mapping for SQLite.

I made a couple browser extensions that make over $500/month each. The key seems to be naming your extension after high-volume search terms and getting good reviews on the chrome store (and obviously having an extension that works well and solve a common problem on major websites). I monetized them with my own service, https://extensionpay.com. Feels so good to eat your own dog food :)

Neat! I'm serving around 120m requests per month for https://extensionpay.com from a 2GB VPS running a single-threaded nodejs process and SQLite as the db. Most of the requests are cached, but still, it's amazing how far you can get with cheap hardware.

I use SQLite/Litestream for https://extensionpay.com! Serves about 120m requests per month (most of those are cached and don't hit the db), but it's been great!

I have no affiliation with Litestream but I was convinced that SQLite could be a viable db option from this great post about it called Consider SQLite: https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite

Using SQLite with Litestream helped me to launch the site quickly without having to pay for or configure/manage a db server, especially when I didn't know if the site would make any money and didn't have any personal experience with running production databases. Litestream streams to blackblaze b2 for literally $0 per month which is great. I already had a backblaze account for personal backups and it was easy to just add b2 storage. I've never had to restore from backup so far.

There's a pleasing operational simplicity in this setup — one $14 DigitalOcean droplet serves my entire app (single-threaded still!) and it's been easy to scale vertically by just upgrading the server to the next tier when I started pushing the limits of a droplet. DigitalOcean's "premium" intel and amd droplets use NVMe drives which seem to be especially good with SQLite.

One downside of using SQLite is that there's just not as much community knowledge about using and tuning it for web applications. For example, I'm using it with SvelteKit and there's not much written online about deploying multi-threaded SvelteKit apps with SQLite. Also, not many example configs to learn from. By far the biggest performance improvement I found was turning on memory mapping for SQLite.

Happy to answer any questions you might have!

I made https://extensionpay.com to monetize my own browser extensions and between that and free distribution on the extension stores it’s really easy to try making extensions that make money. So far devs have made over $300k with ExtensionPay. That said, it still take some skill to find a niche that works.

Just want to put a plug in for https://extensionpay.com/ - I've used it in extensions in the past. It takes away the headache of setting up a backend for payment. They do take an extra 5%, but it's worth it especially. for smaller projects

Have a go at looking at this: https://extensionpay.com,

That's fair. Right now my payment processor (ExtensionPay) doesn't support multiple pricing tiers. However, in the future I'm considering rolling out my own logic so that I can provide a lifetime license option for some users.

Oh nice! Maybe you'd be interested in the tool I built to take payments in extensions: https://extensionpay.com

If your concern is about security of the extension, you may right click on top of the extension's icon and select "Inspect popup". Select the "Network" tab and type CTRL-R to force a reload of the extension. Verify there are no external network requests (except to extensionpay.com for paid features).