-> Transitioned through Appsmith (0$), but decommissioned it in favour of a custom Flask app + local Postgres + Xero API (took 1 month) ($0/m)
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* Codacy ($36/m)
-> various linters in CI + deps security scanners (free)
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* Azure DevOps (private repo) ($86/m)
-> ditched Microsoft-hosted agent pool (many slow, expensive "cloud" agents w/ limited build hours) to 1 free, self-hosted agent (my VPS) $0/m.
Planning to move to Circle CI Free account with up to 5 free self-hosted agents.
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* Zapier ($30/m)
-> N8N on my VPS ($0/m)
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* AWS RDS ($50/m)
-> Localhost Postgres ($0/m): this is so underrated. Hosting the DB on the same server with apps is faaaaast! Cron script to backup it all locally AND to S3 daily.
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* AWS Cloudfront (IDK, non free)
-> Cloudflare proxied DNS (free)
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Extra details
* Authentication to all hosted company services happens at the edge via Cloudflare Zero Trust (also free)
* All services are proxied by Cloudflare "DNS"
* Nginx allows HTTP access only from Cloudflare IP range (for security)
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FUTURE PLANS
* Hosted Wordpress ($29/m)
-> Cloudflare Pages (maybe some workers too) much faster & for free
Because I already had in mind to create the custom Flask app as a self service subscription management portal for my customers, and while I was coding it, I had this a-ha moment when I discovered admin staff could just be using the same app in "god-mode".
That is, I unified the concepts of "customer portal" and back "office tooling". No more need for a Retool replacement.
And another reason: Appsmith is not as good as Retool (yet?) and is a memory hogging Java process. Good riddance, after all!
Thank you for trying Appsmith & apologies that you had a poor experience with the product.
Can I ask if you were pulling a lot of data from your databases to populate the UI? I'm asking because we definitely have our work cut out to handle larger amounts of data.
As you rightly said, Appsmith is written in Java which allocates 25% of available memory by default and expands to 75% memory. You can control this behaviour by adding APPSMITH_JAVA_HEAP_ARG="-Xmx2G" in the docker.env file.
Sorry man, I appreciate your work, and it did helped me when my app was not ready. I would love to give you more detailed feedback, but all I remember is I was trying to use it with previous Retool experience, but there were some differences between the two that caused a minimal learning curve. I did manage to do what I wanted eventually. Back then I was trying to do everything with 4GB of RAM, and when I saw the allocated memory I must say I was very surprised.
Even after you explained it to me now, I still don't understand why the minimum allocated memory (at rest) should be fixed at 25% (or any percent) of all available memory. What happens if I run it on my 64GB M1 Macbook? 16GB for Appsmith? I don't think so. Why not skipping the Xmx option all together? How much performance difference can it ever cause?
