webdevamin VS billabear

I host my freelance web agency website on Vercel. Using Next.js.

For more information, you can read more about me and my niche as a freelance web developer. Contact me for a free quote.

I develop state-of-the-art digital solutions with a focus on your needs: website with excellent SEO, CRMs, admin panels, e-commerce online stores, restaurant apps, everything that needs to be on the screen to promote your business and/or reach more customers and ultimately generate more revenue. As a freelancer, I am your only point of contact. I follow up your project and I finally finish it. A robust, beautiful website with 1 page + all kinds of necessary info, excellent SEO, user-friendliness and performance starting from €300. For a long cooperation I am always there for you. In this way we always prepare the most optimal strategy for every problem. To create a better experience, improve our reputation every time and extend your website/app even further. Visit my website for more info and some existing projects I've realized so far.

My website for more information: https://webdevamin.com

Startup Name / URL: Webdevamin, URL: https://webdevamin.com

Starting August 1, 2023, Railway is going to remove their free Developer plan and people have to switch to Hobby plan which is €5 a month. First Heroku and now Railway. Where do I host my portfolio website for free?

So about a year ago, I wanted to make a transition from being a full-time employee to being a freelancer. First I've created many social media accounts, spread my business word-by-mouth and developed my own website. I have to say that I am really happy I've took the step. To up til now I've had way better results when it comes to developing websites and web applications compared to being an employee: better performance, speed, accessibility, less bugs, etc. I'm just more productive doing freelancing. And normally, being happy makes a human more productive. Compared to being an employee, I feel like I am doing true craftsmanship: building apps for my clients from zero to the last feature. And later on extending them even more. And I am not only talking about making simple websites with WordPress. Some of my mid-large sized projects are custom made with code like Next.js and Laravel. I like to keep my clients under contact so they always come to me to extending features and have a long term partnership. And having written the code myself, I intimately know almost everything of the project, allowing me to pick up where I left off without much effort. This is because I always create a "private readme" and an one page documentation so I know from where I should continue and I also have my own private mini-Notion like SaaS tailored for freelancing.

I did use WordPress for my clients. Even if it was only for frontend without backoffice needed. But nowadays, I am just using Next.js (React framework) to build static websites and host it for free somewhere like Netlify or Cloudflare. My website for example was also made with Wordpress couple of years ago. But I wanted to ant up my web dev skills so I revamped my whole website into Next.js. It is connected with Strapi as a headless CMS though.

I don’t recommend using Wordpress as a Headless CMS because eventually you will have maintain and update plugins and more. If you know how to code, I would recommend PayloadCMS. My website is currently built with Next.js and Strapi. But I am planning to move to PayloadCMS in the near future. Strapi is good if you prefer no-code. PayloadCMS in case you know how to code with Typescript and Node.js.

> Anecdotally, we've seen a number of larger "open-source alternative to X" projects posted on HN of late that are technically self-deployable, but require so much up-front knowledge that it's not actually accessible to those who might truly be liberated by such software.

Any self-hosted application really needs someone technical unless you're providing something like the DigitalOcean deploy button.

Docker-compose requires technical knowledge to run locally. Sure running "docker compose" is easy but installing it often isn't. As someone quite technical I'm honestly not sure how that would work for deploying on to AWS or GCP even though I know it's possible. I would have to look into it.

Ansible scripts require technical knowledge. Again running the command is easy but installing ansible isn't.

How DigitalOcean's deploy button is really easy as is shown in my demo video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbInyGtqLCs&t=1s. Note there is 10 minutes of my app demo inbetween starting the process and me using a deployed version. You can even try it out at https://github.com/BillaBear/billabear it's literally super easy. It's also silly easy to actually build. "DigitalOcean's app platform is so good it makes BillaBear looks good since the deployment is so easy" is literally what I've said to people.

A bit of context so people can understand. I have a subscription management and billing system, it's self-hostable and I provide a managed hosted version too. The license cost is 2,000 GBP using the JetBrains license model with upgrade licenses dropping down to 1,500 GBP. There is technically a lifetime deal (all versions and upgrades) for the next week or so for 500 GBP but I'm not wanting to tell outreach prospects about that it's more of a hidden thing and something I talk about with inbound (because they are normally inbound because they saw the deal and want more info) more context if it helps is billabear.com and github.com/billabear/billabear.

Startup Name / URL BillaBear / www.billabear.com Location of Your Headquarters Berlin, Germany Elevator Pitch/Explainer Video Source-available SaaS Subscription Management and Billing system - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbInyGtqLCs More details: https://github.com/billabear/billabear What life cycle stage is your startup at? Validation Your role? Founder What goals are you trying to reach this month? Get more customers How could r/startups help? Check it out, maybe give a GitHub star and reach out if you need help improving your billing. Discount for r/startups subscribers? Sure email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) mentioning this and I'll give you a lifetime deal for 500 GBP.

It's source-available and can be found at https://github.com/billabear/billabear.