Limiting OpenAI’s token usage isn’t merely desirable because it is cheaper and faster, but also because it increases the size of the overall context. OpenAI caps this at 8.000 tokens for most models with a possibility of up to 32.000 tokens (if you are lucky to get invited, presumably). I haven’t seen anybody offering 32K tokens computations nor showcasing it. So in the meantime optimizing the token usage makes even more sense.

While I was building aihelperbot.com I did what I imagine many developers do: I used an ORM for everything database related. I used ORM to handle migrations, define schemas, insert data, update data, select data, etc. I didn’t think much about it.

It was only later while building aihelperbot.com I started to wonder if I really needed an ORM? Using AI more and more I started to realize that I could do most of the things I did with an ORM directly with SQL. And that I often could do it quicker because I didn’t have to lookup ORM specific syntax. I could just write SQL queries directly.

I wanted to add markdown blog to my NextJS app. Initially I feared it would be a lot of work. But it turned out to be easy when using NextJS server side components, i.e. the appDir. This is the end result:

• blog overview
• blog post

To get started I added the scaffolding for the markdown blog to the appDir:

app/
├── posts/
│   ├── [slug]
│   │   ├── head.tsx
│   │   └── page.tsx
│   ├── head.tsx
│   ├── page.tsx
│   └── utils.ts

The routing logic behind the folder structure is the same used in the pages folder. The blog will be located on /posts and each blog post on /posts/[slug]. The page file in each folder is rendered only on the server and contains the markup for the page. The head files add <title> tags and a few other relevant meta tags.

What does it cost to host a small web app on Render vs Digitalocean with Render’s new pricing model? The tech stack:

• web app running Node.js
• database running Postgres (Render only support Postgres)

What initially made me move git18n and aihelperbot from DigitalOcean to Render was the price. Render’s new pricing model has made it more expensive than DigitalOcean albeit offering significantly less services and options. Render has always felt a bit rough and limited but for the lower price it was still a good deal. Now it’s not.

Render adopted a new pricing scheme for its services on 1st of January 2023. And like DigitalOcean they market it as “predictable pricing” however unlike DigitalOcean it isn’t simple anymore. Render now charges both for its services and per user. The specific user pricing then in turns depends on “group type”, e.g. individual, team or organization.

It is only a price increase while Render’s offerings remains the same. Or that is not exactly true as users in the “individual group” loose autoscaling, which is an important tool to keep cost low for indiehackers and small startups that experience jumps in traffic.