Infrastructure

How we choose, run, and manage the services that power Makenot.work.

Philosophy

We self-host where practical. Every vendor is a dependency, a potential point of failure, and a cost passed to creators. When we do use external services, we choose carefully.

Commodity Over Premium

We go with the cheapest reliable option, not the one with the fanciest dashboard.

No Lock-In

We avoid services that make it hard to leave:

Standard formats: Data stored in formats that work anywhere
Exportable configurations: Settings we can move to another provider
No proprietary APIs: When possible, we use providers that implement open standards
Multi-provider capability: Critical infrastructure can run on multiple vendors

If a provider doubles their prices or changes their terms, we can move.

Open Source Where Possible

We prefer open source for software we run ourselves. Managed services sometimes make sense, but open source is the default.

Cost Transparency

We can explain every line item in our infrastructure bill. See the economics documentation for the breakdown.

Production Stack

Hetzner

VPS (US-West) + S3-compatible Object Storage
Backup: bucket versioning enabled
Exit: standard S3 API, portable to any S3-compatible provider

PostgreSQL

Self-hosted on Hetzner VPS
Daily backups with 30-day retention
Offsite backup replication to a separate machine on personal hardware in a different location
No external managed service dependency

Stripe

Connect (creators onboard directly)
Creators keep their Stripe accounts if they leave
Exit: roadmap item (no backup processor integration yet)

Postmark

Transactional email (password reset, verification, receipts)
Exit: self-hosted migration when scale justifies

Fastmail

Business email (support@, legal@, max@)
Exit: self-hosted migration when scale justifies

Cloudflare

DNS management
CDN for static assets and edge caching
DDoS protection
Free tier sufficient initially

Domain Registrar (Cloudflare)

All domains registered and managed through Cloudflare

Why These Choices

Hetzner over AWS/GCP: 80% cost reduction, US and EU regions available, no vendor lock-in.

Self-hosted PostgreSQL over managed: No external dependency, full control over configuration and backups.

Stripe Connect: Direct payouts to creators without us touching funds. PCI compliance handled entirely by Stripe.

Cloudflare: Free tier covers most needs.

Redundancy

Database: Daily automated backups, point-in-time recovery
Files: Bucket versioning on object storage
Application: Single-server today; load balancer planned at scale
DNS: Cloudflare’s anycast network

Monitoring

Handled by PoM, a self-hosted production operations monitor we built. See Monitoring for details.

Cost Philosophy

Infrastructure costs scale sub-linearly with creator count. We optimize for cost-efficiency, not impressive-sounding tech stacks.

Trade-offs We Accept

Doing things the hard way has costs:

More operational work: Self-hosted infrastructure means maintaining it
Slower feature development: Time on infrastructure is time not on features
Learning curves: Open source tools don’t always have great documentation

The alternative (expensive vendor lock-in with costs passed to creators) is worse.