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Recipes & Playbooks

Common patterns to save money, modernize stacks, and sleep better at night.

1. The Free Tier Aggregator

Cost Saving Multi-Cloud

Problem: Platforms like Vercel, Netlify, and Render offer generous free tiers, but bandwidth or compute overages kill you. You have different services spread across different providers to maximize free usage.

Solution: Use Crate as a unified frontend for multiple free-tier backends. Only pay for the traffic you aggregate.

Architecture

  • Route /api/auth/* → Netlify Functions (Free Auth)
  • Route /api/data/* → Render Web Service (Free Compute)
  • Route /* → Vercel (Free Static Hosting)

Crate unifies these into api.yourapp.com and yourapp.com. Your users never know they are hitting 3 different providers. 

( Incoming Traffic )
|
/         |         \
33%        33%        33%
|          |          |
[Netlify]   [Render]   [Vercel]

2. The Hybrid Saver

Reliability VPS

Problem: Serverless is great for scale-to-zero, but expensive for sustained loads. A $5 VPS is cheap but has hard limits and no auto-scaling.

Solution: Combine the best of both. Send steady, predictable traffic to a cheap VPS. Burst traffic flows to serverless.

Configuration

  • Primary: $5 Hetzner/DigitalOcean Droplet for baseline traffic.
  • Secondary: AWS Lambda / Cloud Run for spikes.

Use Crate to route heavy, predictable endpoints to the VPS to keep costs flat, while keeping high-availability critical paths on serverless.

[ Crate Gateway ]
/     \
/       \
[Primary]   [Burst]
|           |
[VPS ($5)]   [Lambda]
(Steady)     (Spikes)

3. The Legacy Shield

Modernization Legacy

Problem: You have a massive legacy PHP/Java backend that works, but you want to build a modern React/Next.js frontend. You can't rewrite the whole backend at once.

Solution: "Strangler Fig" pattern. Put Crate in front of everything. Serve the new frontend immediately, and gradually point specific API routes to new microservices as you build them, falling back to the legacy monolith for everything else.

The Migration Path

  1. Point example.com to Crate.
  2. Route /, /_next/* to Vercel (New Frontend).
  3. Route /api/v1/* to Legacy Monolith (Old Backend).
  4. Rewrite /api/v2/users to New Go Microservice.

You get a single, secure entrypoint. You check logs in one place. Your users get a modern fast UI today, while you refactor the backend over months.

[ Crate Gateway ]
/        |        \
/         |         \
[New UI]   [New API]   [Legacy]
|           |           |
[Vercel]      [Go]       [PHP]

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