I moved six side projects off Neon and Vercel onto a single $6/mo VPS with SQLite and Litestream. My hosting bill went from $72 to $6. Everything is faster.
The Vercel + Neon tax
Two side projects with any traffic at all, and the bill is $50+ before you do anything. Serverless cold starts, connection pooling dramas, egress.
The new setup
- One VPS on Hetzner CPX21, $6/month, 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM.
- One SQLite file per project, checkpointed continuously to S3 by Litestream.
- Caddy as reverse proxy.
- Deploy is
rsync.
What I lost
The ability to say "we're serverless" on a resume slide. That's basically it.
What I gained
Every query is sub-millisecond because the database is a file on the same disk as the app. Deploys finish before I've Alt-Tabbed away. My bill is lunch money.
CaveatIf you need multi-region writes or you're serving a million QPS, none of this applies. For a side project with 200 daily actives, it's liberation.