My AI is local, my code is hand-rolled: Why I'm falling in love with building small again
It was 2 a.m. and I was staring at my AWS billing dashboard again. My “fun little side project” — LinkNibble, a tool that saves articles and gives me smart summaries — had quietly turned into a mess of Lambda functions, API Gateway, RDS, S3, EventBridge, and way too many IAM roles.
All for something that should have been simple.
I had fallen into the classic trap: reaching for enterprise cloud tools by default, even though I was the only user. The bill wasn’t insane, but it was ridiculous. Every small change felt unnecessarily complex. I wasn’t building anymore — I was gluing services together.
So I decided to go cloud-optional.
Not “burn it all down and go off-grid.” Just intentional. For my personal projects, I stopped defaulting to the most complex solution and started asking: What’s the simplest thing that actually works?
I moved LinkNibble to a single €5/month Hetzner VPS. The transformation looked like this:
- From: AWS Lambda + API Gateway + RDS + S3
- To: FastAPI + PostgreSQL + Caddy in Docker Compose
The biggest game-changer? I replaced OpenAI API calls with Ollama running a local model (Llama 3.1). My AI is now local — no token bills, no rate limits, and summaries that actually feel like mine.
The over-engineered cron job that used to require Lambda, S3, and multiple IAM roles? Now it’s a simple script with a systemd timer.
What I gained:
- Costs dropped from ~$40–55/month to €5
- Faster development and debugging
- Full ownership and control
- Way more joy
I still use the cloud when it makes sense (especially for scale, teams, or spiky traffic). But for side projects? I’m done with unnecessary complexity.
There’s something deeply satisfying about shipping a project that feels like yours again — local-first where it counts, hand-rolled in the right places, and simple by choice.
If you’ve been feeling the same quiet frustration with cloud bills and complexity creep, maybe it’s time to try building small again.
Read the full story (with all the mistakes, lessons, and technical details) here:
→ https://sharetxt.live/blog/what-i-learned-from-going-cloud-optional-with-my-side-projects
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