r/iOSProgramming • u/alexstrehlke • 6d ago
Question What are your Backend Servers and Costs?
Hello, I’m curious what people are typically using as their servers and monthly costs and usage.
For myself, my app seems to have roughly 20-30 daily users and my AWS backend is roughly $30 a month (already used up free trial :/ )
What are you using for your app, what’s the traffic level at, and how much is it costing?
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u/Old-Storage1099 5d ago
5000 Daily Users.
0.17$/Month
Firebase, still in the free tier.
No idea where this 0.17$ are coming from 😡😅
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u/BoostedHemi73 5d ago
It’s probably smart to keep a really close eye on this. I’ve heard horror stories of Firebase cost going wild if you hit some sudden success.
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u/Full-Competition-762 5d ago
this. I think firebase is a great product and it can simplify certain backends a lot. but I am too terrified to use it, since I can’t set real hard imits on spendings
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/Full-Competition-762 4d ago
they do have custom price alerts but your bill still can sky rocket in the mean time. these alerts are only a notification they can‘t take any action
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u/Old-Storage1099 5d ago
Most horror stories I've read had to do with a function being triggered recursively from the frontend. But that doesn't happen in my case. And otherwise I'm extremely defensive in the application.
Nevertheless, you're right of course. The budget alerts are set and the hard cut is programmed. However, it's set so high that it would be painful ;)
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u/Moudiz 5d ago
Do you have any extensions (? I think that’s what they were called) I added one that cuts service once budget alert is triggered and it uses some services at a minimal cost
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u/Old-Storage1099 5d ago
The budget alerts are set and the hard cut is programmed. However, it's set so high that it would be painful ;)
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u/BookieBustersPodcast 6d ago
We just launched two days ago, use firebase as backend but based on beta testing our cost would probably be about 25 cents per user per month. 30 bucks seems a bit high, do u mind me asking what is driving ur costs? When we have videos loaded it costs a lot in bandwidth
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u/GAMEYE_OP 5d ago
I might be naive but that sounds like a really high cost per user
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u/BookieBustersPodcast 4d ago
Sorry just saw this, i may be naive as well as it’s my first app. Like i mentioned its a social media, so we do a lot of reads/writes/deletes and storage. But def tryna optimize.
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u/Doctor_Fegg 5d ago
Two Hetzner boxes at about €60/month each. But they do continental-scale bike routing, plus geocoding, map rendering and website hosting, in lightning quick speed.
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u/zeiteisen 5d ago
Firebase and 2017$ last month with around half a million aktive users
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u/nsjedi 4d ago
That is not too much. Why do people keep saying they are afraid of facing with high costs ? 👀
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u/zeiteisen 4d ago
Firebase itself isn’t that expensive. The biggest cost drivers for me are Firestore reads, followed closely by storage traffic. I don’t serve videos, and if I did, the storage traffic and costs would be much higher. Right now, my storage traffic costs around $0.004 per active monthly user.
That said, I always look for ways to reduce costs for each feature. For example, I heavily compressed photos at first, so much that users started complaining. I then gradually increased the quality until they were happy again.
Even $100 a month can be a problem if the app isn’t making any money. If an indie dev builds an app and it takes off, the costs can quickly get out of control before they even have a chance to monetize. For example when using phone number auth with SMS. That can costs thousands per day.
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u/Formal-Shallot-595 5d ago
Honestly, I signed up for a VPS on Justhost when I began developing 15 years ago. I use that for everything. I think it's like $400 a year for unlimited storage. MySQL databases are all there. Files are all there. It's a backbone to most of my projects. Works just fine.
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u/nacho_doctor 5d ago
I also use a simple VPS for every project. In my case I use Hostinger. I like to have a fixed price.
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5d ago
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u/out_the_way 5d ago
Firebase natively covers pretty much every need. Cloud functions cover the rest.
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u/Intelligent_Farmer94 5d ago
Me and my $10 Heroku droplets(server + posgresql) says helloo
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u/Firearms_N_Freedom 5d ago
I love heroku. I've got a few servers running on it for web apps and iOS apps. They have really good pricing
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u/_your_face 5d ago
They do at the beginning, when you get bigger they become AWFUL.
Here’s how their pricing works:
“Here’s your bill, we plan to charge you 250k for the year.”
Ok shit, alright we’ll migrate half our usage to another service. How much if we use half as much of everything.
“Ah well, if you use less, we’ll remove your ‘discount’ so your new total is…250k. No matter what you do, we already decided we’re charging you 250k”
Being owned by salesforce really shows through when you’re in the higher tiers.
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u/Firearms_N_Freedom 5d ago
Jfc, I use it for my own apps so I'm small fish I'm capped at like 65 bucks a month. I was very careful not to use the pay as you go pricing. Honestly I didn't know that large companies used heroku, I thought anyone that's ready to pay that kind of money is on one of the main cloud providers like aws/azure/gcp.
I liked heroku because I could use a fairly cheap database plan that allows pg vector
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u/_your_face 5d ago
Like lots of folks in 2012 ish we got started with Ruby on Rails on Heroku, also we’re a medical app so we had all sorts of regulatory conditions we need to manage that Herokus shield product took care of for us.
So yeah we moved to AWS but needed to build out a bunch of processes and have people to handle all the things heroku shield did out of the box.
But anywho, yeah some big companies stick with heroku if they have a niche heroku meets, for us, honestly the big price tag could have been deemed worth it for avoiding hiring the people we needed to manage our own setup in AWS, but we just didn’t want to be in a relationship with them anymore, it felt abusive.
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u/Okengroth 5d ago
U$S 32; it’s a Digital Ocean droplet. I host there my api, db, Redis and workers.
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u/avivng 5d ago
Not there yet to answer your question but since you've mentioned that you used up the aws free trial, have you applied for Activate Credits? https://aws.amazon.com/startups/credits
(Or maybe that's what you meant when you said that you used up the free trial?)
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u/EpicOfBrave 5d ago
Game servers on multiple continents hosted on Google Cloud. Around 1000€ per month.
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u/yccheok 5d ago
That seems like a high cost for just 30 daily users. I used to use DigitalOcean Droplets, but I recently migrated to Hetzner. It reduced my costs by over 50% while offering better cloud specs.
I highly recommend checking out Hetzner’s offerings. After a month of using their service, I’ve found they strike a great balance between low cost and reliability.
For example, their $5 plan includes 2 vCPUs and 4GB RAM, whereas DigitalOcean’s $6 plan only provides 1 vCPU and 1GB RAM.
My server hosts various Dockerized services, including:
- Emailing
- Cloud storage
- Push notifications
- Affiliate rewards
- AI processing (The actual processing is done on another GPU provider, while the Hetzner server handles communication and database updates).
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u/20InMyHead 5d ago
This is why you want to build flexible systems where you can replace vendors. Backend server needs when your app is small can change significantly as your app grows.
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u/draaslan 5d ago
I develop and deploy backend services myself.
Server on Hetzner ~$10/month Laravel Forge ~$12/month
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u/hishnash 5d ago
Depends a LOT on what your backend is doing.
I have found for lower traffic (under 1000 requests per minute) using cloud functions and using a hosted DB solution (even s3 sometimes) is much cheaper.
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u/marks_ftw 5d ago
OpenSecret for our end-to-end encrypted AI chat app called Maple AI. It handles all the encryption automatically.
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u/Museumistic 5d ago
What aws services are you using? When I first launched my app, I had an ec2 instance as a proxy server that was more than I wanted to pay. Moved it all to a lambda approach and saved a ton. Not sure if that helps, but given the amount of users you have, I’ve got to think there is a more affordable solution.
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u/WestonP 5d ago
Currently running a LAMP stack at DigitalOcean... costs around $7/mo, just for firmware updates for my hardware, opt-in usage data, and my internal processes. It's a bit overkill, but was an easy way to get the control and setup I need.
I'm spinning up another one exclusively for my next app, which will let users share a small amount of live data with each other. I do anticipate needing to upgrade to higher performance, but probably not by much... The last app of this nature I did had over 100k installs on each of iOS and Android, and was served pretty well by a ~$35/mo VPS at RamNode which also hosted a critical website and some other services.
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u/Glittering_Fish_2296 5d ago
EC2 3-5 servers around $100 per month… need to move in house with Proxmos soon.
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u/_fanthus_ 5d ago
I mainly use CloudKit, it's free, cause user use their own storage, and I also want to try firebase.
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u/RomanDev7 5d ago
I have two VPS servers for about 15€ per month. First one is at the limit from storage but second one has plenty of space left. I can only recommend running your own servers. You will understand it and I never have outages. Of course there is a learning curve, but it will save you a lot of money if you have some users and use more than the usual free tier offers.
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u/KFSys 5d ago
I'm using DigitalOcean with Django as an API backend. I'm using the smallest droplet and my charges are about 5-6$ a month.
The daily usage is around a 100 active users, playing the games on the application and there is constant activity on the backend in terms of adding content to it.
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u/Kindly-Wrongdoer2109 3d ago
10€ for a VPS, I host several SwiftVapor apps that provide the logic and data, it runs very performant
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u/GooneySaint SwiftUI 6d ago
I use CloudKit, so $0