I've been doing most of my development on localhost and am at the stage now where I'm wanting to start working on the project in a more genuine staging environment, e.g., practice sending emails, resetting passwords, setting up bots for production, access controls, etc. I've gotten my site self-hosted on AWS -- but the cost is still a bit high for me ($300/month). Are there any guidelines for how to minimize self-hosting costs while still in development? Thanks!

albert - is there a reason a hosted project won't work for this purpose?

Oh, hi Reshma! Thanks for chiming in! Well, I'm using a few bots... (nothing fancy -- just an audio transcription bot and an Anthropic-Claude bot to parse the transcript). But I think the (free) hosted on medplum seems to not have bot access? Though... if I had bot access, I would totally be down to develop on medplum's hosted servers. 🙂 That would be awesome and make the development process much easier, I think.

ah got it! You are right - free hosted does not have Bots. You might try "Install on Ubuntu"? https://www.medplum.com/docs/self-hosting/install-on-ubuntu

Thanks for the link. Super helpful! Whew... I actually have been able to build out a fairly complete "poor man's" development environment using the following tools: localhost installation: turn on bots: https://share.descript.com/view/JWMqRaCBq6Z (BTW, this would be a great video to put up on your Medplum youtube channel) email: using Sendgrid webhooks: (checking webhooks with pipeline.com) and then using Sandbox webhook sending --> ngrok --> localhost:8103 which is close enough to a "poor man's" development environment -- even if it's on localhost rather than AWS -- to keep me busy for a while! Bots, email, and webhooks, hurrah! So... I think I should be able to bring this project pretty close to the finish line using these tools. Marking this as solved. 🙂 Thanks!

I’ve been working to deploying in digital ocean and writing a guide. Happy to show it Is much cheaper and they offer enough credits for a few months

That would be awesome! Thanks so much!

Amazing. Sent you a dm

Why is aws bill $300? have you configured the correct ec2 instance type and rds instance? you may have over provisioned - its easy do to.

Yep I want to. Haven’t finished it yet. I have Postgres and redis run in using their managed services. medplum running on docker on their app service. Lots of env vars I’ll write down what I have or start a pull request this week There’s a couple of things I haven’t figured out yet like SES email, and might require asking digital ocean for help or running a custom medplum

Awesome. Thnaks so much! I sent you a DM and looking forward to giving it a try!

Created a blog post with the progress we have so far, once i have it all working will also send a pull rquest for the official documentaiton https://ehr.caliman.org/docs/2025-host-digital-ocean

Hello @albert_wong I might try the same next week (minimize AWS cost). Did you try using valkey for elasticache? (cost can get down to 6$/month for this one https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/10/amazon-elasticache-valkey/) I haven't tried it yet but I would like to.

@Thanos Vidakis I didn't try using valkey -- though I think I did modify a few variables to decrease elasticcache spend. Keep us posted on how it goes! PS. Not sure, but this thread below might be helpful. https://discord.com/channels/905144809105260605/1113936455954346005/threads/1235350299842056313