Item — HN Reader

Hi, Sebastien here, creator of this side project :)

A little context about the creation of the app:

It all started in July when, for the book I just started writing, I created a web app that generates the HTML and CSS to embed a 3D book cover on a website. I posted it here on HackerNews, and, big surprise, it was a huge success! It stayed #1 for the whole day and brought me a lot of useful feedback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23896856

From that day, I kept in my mind to create an application to enable people to create a 3D Cover and embed it without caring about the HTML and CSS, just by copying and pasting a small code snippet wherever they want.

I developed it using tools I already knew, using cloud services when possible, because my goal was to release as soon as possible.

A small overview of the tech stack:

- Node.js/Express for the webserver

- Heroku to host the webserver

- MongoDB Atlas for the database

- React, only for the 3D cover editor

- Auth0 for the authentication

- Cloudinary to host images

- Stripe to handle premium account purchase

What do you think?

Isn't all that really expensive for hosting a small bit of javascript and a few images (all of which could be linked into 1 single request) ?

I guess I'm saying I'd love to hear a bit about what the hosting + running costs of such a solution are.

For now the costs are very low, only the domain name and $5 for Heroku. The rest is free, and should remain until I have huge traffic.

But I agree with you, a more optimized architecture could be more scalable, this will be for a second version ;)

I love it! Used it to make the book shown on my site https://tiny.mba

Also cool, I use it in a browser overlay when I do livestreaming with OBS! Once I realized I could embed HTML/CSS in the stream I was able to copy/paste this right into the overlay. So easy.

Very cool Alex, glad you like it :)

congrats on launching! tracked your Netlify tool since the previous show hn. since launching my book I realized the need for a beautiful book image haha. I now have a directory of device mock tools https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#dev... and you're in there

Very cool, thanks :)