Making my first (production) website: Questions about auth, pricing, and hosting
For background, I’m currently studying online in college and have built several websites for my classes using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Until this semester, all of our projects were static sites hosted on GitHub Pages. Recently, we started learning backend development and building fully functional websites using Node.js.
A local business has asked me to build a website for them. I’m using Next.js for this project, and the site needs to include:
* A home page
* Functionality to create and display events
* The ability to upload and display images
* Integration with Square (since they already use it for their business operations)
I’ve already built most of the website’s structure and plan to use UploadThing for handling image uploads.
The parts that I am unsure about are:
* Authentication: I want to ensure that only the business owners can upload images or create events. I’m not sure how to implement authentication yet, and I'm especially unsure about what service(s) to use for this.
* Database: I’ll be using PostgreSQL to store events, posts, and image metadata.
* Cost Efficiency: The business owners are good people that I've known for years, and I don’t want to give them a site with high upkeep costs.
I’m considering:
Hosting the website on Vercel Pro,
Using Neon or Supabase for the database.
I’ve spent hours researching the best options for this setup, but I’d really appreciate advice from others who’ve done similar projects. Should I just stick with either Neon or Supabase? Are there better options?
3 Replies
Hey! For small/medium businesses I think a cost-effective tool would be supabase(auth, storage, db) cost from 0 to $25.
Authjs, Neon db, uploadthing could be another path!!
Thanks. I think that I am going to try supabase, especially since it looks like I can self-host while I'm testing it out, then move to a hosted solution later
Theo has a $0 prod video if you wanna take a look. But think it uses clerk and you might end up paying(min 25 per month) depending on the auth features you need
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkOSUVzOAA4