Tools and cloud services to build MVPs / startups at low cost

Building MVP may be tough for entrepreneurs who just started their startups with small investments. This post is for people who looking for tools and services [cloud services] to build their MVP phase at less cost and sometimes "zero cost"

1. Wireframe - 'http://diagrams.net' is a free tool [previously known as http://draw.io] to build wireframes for free, designing software architecture diagrams and DB designs.

2. Documentation - Use google Docs for preparing BRD document or wiki pages inside GitLab / GitHub/ Bitbucket. For API documentation use wiki pages itself or API documentation tools like swagger ( instance inside Heroku or other free services)

3. Serverless

* Backend services will scale up and down based on your traffic and you only need to pay based on your traffic.  

* Scaling/sysadmin and management pains can be removed from our side and cloud providers will take care of these.

* Since we only paying for traffic we generated, sometimes we can build MVPs using zero cost ( most of the services have the flexibility of only pay after your basic usage, like after 1 million requests).

AWS:  

* use DynamDB as NoSQL server

* Aurora serverless as relational Database

* SNS / SQS for asynchronous tasks

* Lambda functions for API backend services
* Cloudfront as CDN

* S3 as the storage service

Google cloud: use firebase as your main BaaS service. Where  

* Use Firestore as Main Database  

* Firebase is an amazing tool to develop real-time apps

* You only need to pay for your usage

* Use cloud functions for managing API services

* Firebase auth for authentication

* To run stateless dockerized services run inside google cloud run

* At the same time firebase has limitation for search functionalities place an algolia / elastic search engine for those functionalities.

* For running asynchronous process either use firebase events/task queues.

Most of the cloud providers offer similar services and for some services, you only need to pay for usage and that is also after a threshold usage like 1 million requests per month free. For initial signup, Google/ Azure/ and AWS will also give us some credits on initial signup and make use of it. This will cover most of the development cost as well