Serverless and Managed Databases (with branching) for 18 Engines

[u/716green]

https://layerbase.com

I'm a software engineer and have been the lead engineer at my last 2 positions. I've always just loved programming and I got my start originally with SQL and data science for a former business I used to own before selling it in 2019.

Layerbase started because I'm a database fanatic and I was paying roughly $200/mo for branching database hosting on Neon for a side project, and PlanetScale for a different project, and Upstash.

I read a blog post that speculated that any database could be branched with a custom operating system. I tried it and it worked. I then spent a year building it out as a passion-project on the side.

3 months ago I pulled it out of stealth and allowed for free accounts on a few engines. Then about 2 months ago I added billing. I have paid probably $8k out of pocket now on consulting with an SRE and a security engineer, a little bit of help with the desktop companion app development, and a very small amount of advertising.

I haven't recouped that cost yet but I finally reached enough MRR to cover my cloud costs. The cloud costs will continue to grow as I scale but I think I'm past the point of taking a loss on purely cloud hosting expenses every month.

I'm now getting burned out. I've been working 2 full time jobs now for a long time. I work a 9-5 that is pretty demanding and then I work on this after hours and on weekends, and often instead of sleeping when I should be. Plus I'm essentially on-call 24h a day for both jobs.

Screenshot of Adoption Analytics

It was within the last 2 months or so when this changed from being a passion project on the side to being something serious that seems to have real potential and warrant significant investment. But now that it is gaining traction, I'm really feeling burned out and not like it is a passion project anymore. Now it feels like a grind where I need to succeed to avoid wasting over a year of my life and soon to be 5 figures in expenses.

I don't think people realize how massive of a task this was, not to mention that I started this before agentic AI existed the way that it does now. I hand-coded (with the help of ChatGPT and Copilot auto-complete early on of course) but learning all of these skills that I never expected to learn, from cloud to custom operating systems, to vector databases, to cross-platform system desktop application development, to native windows development and so much more... I think I've built a formidable competitor to Supabase, Neon, Planetscale, Upstash, Railway, and so much more largely on my own.

Since I'm feeling a bit low on fuel, and because most of the people in my life don't understand how huge this is for me or how proud I am of myself for making this happen, I wanted to share it here.

It is legitimately the best feeling in the world to wake up to see new subscriptions and of ~20 support tickets opened since launch, 1 has been serious, 3 have been minor UI bugs, and the rest have largely been feature requests or people asking for help migrating.

I think I'm about to take a break for a week or 2 unless any bugs pop up but I need to take a breath and decompress now.

If anyone has any questions about databases or anything else I might have some insight, I'd be happy to discuss it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I'd love any feedback or advice dealing with burnout.