I've been hosting one of my side projects on AWS. The project actually did quite well for a while, generating a few thousand euros per month. Then COVID hit, regulations changed, and the problem it solved basically disappeared overnight. Revenue dropped to zero, the startup credits I received held out for quite some time, after that I kept the project running, paying out of pocket, thinking maybe it would recover. The hosting costs were reasonable for my salary.
Then one day, after ignoring a few AWS emails, I got hit with a charge on my card that was orders of magnitude higher than usual.
"WTF?"
I logged in immediately to investigate. No DDoS. No misconfiguration. Then I checked the billing page:
*RDS PostgreSQL “legacy fee” — ~€200* for March
Apparently, I hadn’t upgraded from Postgres 13 to 16. That was it.
I had been paying ~€25/month for RDS, and suddenly there’s a €200 charge for essentially… not upgrading.
That was the moment it clicked for me: Why am I running this in the cloud?
I had a spare Raspberry Pi at home. For my use case, I just needed something that runs reliably. So I moved everything to self-hosting.
And immediately ran into a different set of problems:
Deployments were manual (SSH → pull → restart).
Debugging required logging into the machine every time.
Monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana) was too heavy for small devices.
So I started building a small agent for myself. It began as a deployment tool, but gradually evolved into something more:
- deploy apps from GitHub or Docker automatically
- self-healing processes with restart logic
- system metrics + lightweight monitoring
- *heartbeats so I know if a device/service is actually alive*
- *log forwarding so I don’t have to SSH in to debug*
- reverse tunnels (I use it for Home Assistant instead of Nabu Casa)
- remote terminal access from the browser
I named it Beacon. It’s open source, and I’ve been running it for the last ~8 months. Everything runs locally on the device (Pi, mini PC, etc.) but there is an optional beaconinfra.dev integration — mainly for monitoring, Home Assistant (or other local app) tunnel, and remote access. I host beaconinfra myself too, and since then I moved away from the Pi to an N100.
Did you notice any strange patterns in how news were reported, or maybe that sometimes it almost look like some conspiracy theories could be true? Or realized after a while how corrupt people really are?
Yes, it's mostly vibe coded, I only touched it when Claude was hallucinating or didn't understand what I wanted. I used Cursor with Claude model and about 90% of the code is AI generated.