I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

Lean, stubborn, and oddly liberating

It has been reported that Steve Hanov says he runs multiple companies pulling in roughly $10,000 MRR each while keeping monthly infrastructure costs around $20. Last night, he alleges, a pitch night pre-interview ended with a blunt question: "What do you even need funding for?" Ouch. The emotional beat is clear — pride mixed with a little defiance. Why beg for runway when you can stretch a dollar into six months of breathing room?

The cheap-but-competent infra playbook

His playbook reads like a manifesto against cloud‑native complexity. Forget spinning up an EKS cluster, RDS instance, or a NAT gateway and accidentally burning $300 before a single user clicks your landing page. Instead: one VPS (Linode or DigitalOcean), $5–$10 a month, 1GB of RAM, and a swapfile if you need a little wiggle room. With one box, you know where the logs live, why it crashed, and how to restart it. Simple wins.

Go, static binaries, and fewer moving parts

Language choice is part of the cost story. Hanov favors Go over memory-hungry interpreters like Python or Ruby. Compile to a single static binary, scp it to the server, and you're done — no dependency hell, fewer runtime surprises, and far lower RAM overhead. It's a reminder that sometimes the fastest way to scale is to refuse to over-engineer in the first place. Less plumbing. More product.

Local AI as a debit-card alternative to API bills

For long-running or batch AI tasks he reportedly uses local models and a secondhand RTX 3090 bought for about $900 (allegedly from Facebook Marketplace) running VLLM and tools like Ollama. That’s an upfront hit, but it wipes out recurring API bills and gives you full control for massive batch jobs — think summarizing quarterly reports for niche market products. The broader point: a group of bootstrappers is quietly embracing local AI and tiny VPS stacks to trade VC pressure for creative freedom. Want runway or prestige? Sometimes the smarter play is the one that costs less than your streaming subscription.

Sources: stevehanov.ca, Hacker News