Haha, the man is clearly a beast of a product designer and executor. I don't think I would succeed with the same tools.
Honestly, spending $200/mo is insignificant to me. And I'm pretty happy to answer the question of "Why can this guy build this thing on a single VPS and you can't?" with "Well, because he's better than me".
I can be up in 15 mins on Heroku with a Rails+React web app. And in an hour have a thing. Or for a static no-login thing, faster with Netlify.
But it doesn't matter. Because I never made a product as nice as the one he made. If the outcome is I'm -$200/mo that is irrelevant to me. If the outcome is I'm +$50k/mo that is very relevant. So I'm going to optimize for how I can do the latter.
Honestly, spending $200/mo is insignificant to me. And I'm pretty happy to answer the question of "Why can this guy build this thing on a single VPS and you can't?" with "Well, because he's better than me".
I can be up in 15 mins on Heroku with a Rails+React web app. And in an hour have a thing. Or for a static no-login thing, faster with Netlify.
But it doesn't matter. Because I never made a product as nice as the one he made. If the outcome is I'm -$200/mo that is irrelevant to me. If the outcome is I'm +$50k/mo that is very relevant. So I'm going to optimize for how I can do the latter.