Journey of Cheapass.in: A side project to a DIY platform
summary
Cheapass.in grows from a one‑person side project into a real service used by 7.5k users and sending 6,50,000 price drop alerts before shutdown, built as a full‑stack JS system with NodeJS MongoDB Android and iOS apps plus web clients, bookmarklet and a Twitter bot. Operational bottlenecks include scraping throttles, proxy and rate‑limit strategy, array‑vs‑document data model changes to avoid giant writes, and spinning up serverless handlers; a later replication on Zeit Now, AWS Lambda and Google Firestore proves feasible but not immortal.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Start
- 5:25the curious case of db sche
- 7:48processing data stored in a data
- 9:34spawn with care
- 11:45never rely on systems you didn't
- 20:55create flexible endpoints
- 25:48tiny incentives go a long way
- 27:28there's no perfect product
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