Sarah Chen is a solo developer running three SaaS products in different niches — a writing tool, a scheduling app, and a developer utility. Total hosting cost: $12/month.

The Setup

2x Hetzner CX21 (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM) — $12/mo each, but Sarah shares one for dev/staging
Self-hosted Postgres for all three apps
Cloudflare free tier for CDN and DNS
Better Stack for monitoring

"I could run all three on a single VPS," Sarah says, "but I keep them separate for isolation. One app getting popular won't affect the others."

Her Stack

| Layer | Choice | Why | |-------|--------|-----| | Frontend | Next.js | Fast, great DX | | Backend | Node.js + Fastify | Fast, low overhead | | Database | PostgreSQL | Reliable, familiar | | Auth | Clerk | Saves months of work | | Payments | Stripe | Standard | | Hosting | OpenClaw | Cheap, reliable |

The Workflow

Building New Features

Branch in GitHub
Push → GitHub Actions runs tests
Merge to main → auto-deploys to staging
Test on staging (via OpenClaw preview URLs)
Tag release → auto-deploys to production

Monitoring

Better Stack uptime checks every 60 seconds
Telegram alerts on downtime
Weekly log review for errors

Database Backups

OpenClaw handles automatic daily backups
Point-in-time recovery if something goes wrong
"I've used it twice in 18 months. Saved me once."

Revenue Breakdown

| Product | MRR | Hosting Cost | Margin | |---------|-----|--------------|--------| | Prose (writing tool) | $340 | $4 | 98.8% | | ScheduleKit (scheduling) | $520 | $4 | 99.2% | | DevDash (developer tool) | $180 | $4 | 97.8% |

Total MRR: $1,040. Total hosting: $12.

What Sarah Says

"OpenClaw lets me compete with teams 10x my size. I have the same infrastructure they do — SSL, databases, auto-scaling — without the team. My competitors pay $500-1000/month for the same thing I'm running for $12." — Sarah Chen, Indie Hacker

Key Takeaways

Start small — one $6/mo VPS can run 2-3 small apps
Separate prod from staging — but share the VPS for staging
Use managed services for what matters — Clerk for auth, Stripe for payments
Monitor everything — Better Stack catches issues before users do
Self-host what you can — Postgres, Redis, logs — save money where it doesn't matter

How Sarah Builds 3 SaaS Products Solo with OpenClaw