Nomad setups that work everywhere. Host of the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
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Joined May 2010
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As a teenager in post-communist Poland, my life was already mapped out. Good grades, office job, settle down. I rejected all of it.
John Ho put it bluntly on my podcast: technology keeps pushing us to need nobody. All you need is an AI agent and a bunker. He builds colivings in Chiang Mai for the opposite reason. Who do you still need in person?
Marc Wieland was seasick for the first week of a Sri Lanka to Maldives sailing trip. The second week he worked from the boat. Starlink was on board.
A Swiss web developer who has worked 80 percent since he was 19, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
Have you worked from a boat? How was the connection?
#digitalnomad #starlink #sailinglife #remotework #nerdontour
Bali, by the pool near Poppies Lane. Fajar Siddiq logs into FTP and finds his whole server SQL-injected: twenty thousand duplicate folders, client sites down.
Maker and web developer, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
What broke for you at the worst possible moment on the road?
#digitalnomad #webdeveloper #bali #cybersecurity #nerdontour
Five podcast guests, five ways around banks and borders.
Marc Wieland moved his main travel account from Revolut to Wise for transparent fees. He keeps Revolut as backup to double his free ATM withdrawals.
Muhammed Alard cannot use PayPal on a Turkish passport. He moves money as USDT stablecoin, even to family in Syria.
Fajar Siddiq set up a Singapore company from abroad through an online service, then the bank account, then an employment pass to relocate.
Lorenzo Simonini sells pasta across the EU. Under about 35,000 EUR a year to France, he charges Italian VAT. Above that, he must register for French VAT.
Ryan Li is a US citizen living in Asia. He files US taxes every year, but as a tax resident elsewhere roughly the first 120,000 USD can be exempt.
None of this is advice, just what worked for them. What is your workaround?
One plugin update. Every page on Guillaume Lorain's sites set to noindex.
Google dropped them. For a blogger who earns from search, that is income gone, not just traffic.
He moved to Rank Math after that. Worth a two-minute check of your indexing settings after every SEO plugin update.
Which update broke something you rely on?
Thailand's DTV: about 100 USD, five years, leave roughly once a year. Ramon Morcillo calls it the first real digital nomad visa and got it before they take it away.
Mapmelon co-founder, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast. Details are as of recording; check the current rules.
Which visa made you stay somewhere longer?
#digitalnomad #thailand #dtvvisa #nomadvisa #nerdontour
Piotrek Bodera retweeted
💸 Update: My total biz expenses have now dropped to just ~$300/mo!
This is to run all my websites/apps serving per year:
- 20,000 paying customers
- 252 million visitors
- 2.4 billion requests
- 2.4 petabyte (PB) in bandwidth
(~$8,000/mo if you add the $7,000/mo GPU bill and $800/mo R2 storage I pay for Photo AI, I exclude it above because it's one project that's so much more expensive in size than all the other sites together, but included in the chart below)
Claude Code helped me to find smart ways to save more money, AI is just really really really good at finding cost savings by itself, which is not so great for the economy short-term, but long term it trims all the fat and opens up spending for better investments I think
Anyway here's what it saved me in money, almost $34,000/mo:
- $29,000/mo - switched to better and cheaper video models on Photo AI, video was very expensive and since I didn't update it ever it stayed expensive, also routed some image jobs to Google Cloud where I have some Google Cloud Credits, and also routed some jobs to Sume which sells AI models at market cost, very cool! This made my GPU bill go from $36,000/mo to $7,000/mo
- $3,000/mo - consolidated my servers, cancelled Digital Ocean and Linode and moved everything to Hetzner saving about $3,000/mo
- $1100/mo - analyzed my Backblaze B2 server backups, I had infinite versioning and lifecycle policies, that's reduced now to 30 days, this literally pushed the bill from $1,200/mo to $26/mo, about 50x cheaper! I had essentially versions of files for all my servers for over a decade, crazy!
- $400/mo - similarly added Lifecycle Policies to my Cloudflare R2 bucket for Photo AI, pics are automatically put in cheaper Infrequent Access after 90 days, there was years of photos in there so this reduced the R2 bill from $1,200/mo to $800/mo
- $118/mo - Claude analyzed all my Cloudflare Domain registrations, lots of domains I didn't use and didn't make sense to keep paying for, lots of things that also don't really make sense anymore in a post-AGI world, renewals for .io TLD are now $50/year which adds up fast!
- $100/mo - Claude also analyzed my Claude subscription (yes!) and discovered I don't even use the Max 20x plan limits, so I downgraded from $200/mo to $100/mo
Even including Photo AI, I have now cut my costs by 90% from last year, getting me close to my biz expenses amount from a decade ago when I started building things
Costs slowly creep up over the years and you don't realize all the things you're spending on but AI is nice to help you figure all that out (also in your personal life!)
✨ I replaced all these SaaS with my own vibe coded now, so about $25,000/mo savings:
- Weather API -> My own vibe coded weather service using Norway's meteorology API
- Image resizing API -> My own vibe coded image resizing API with NodeJS's Sharp + Redis (saves ~$1,500/mo)
- Google Vision NSFW detection -> My own $0/mo vibe coded NSFW detection service with Python's NudeNET (saves ~$2,500/mo)
- Cloudflare Streaming -> My own $0/mo Nginx VPS video streaming (saves ~$250/mo)
- API Flash -> My own $0/mo screenshot service (for social images) (saves ~$250/mo)
- New Relic + IPHub -> My own $0/mo error monitoring, DDOS blocking and fleet management service (called error2telegram) (saves ~$250/mo)
- Human moderators -> My own moderation on all my sites with @xAI (saves ~$10,000/mo)
- IFTTT -> Telegram bot (saves ~$100/mo)
- Photopea as editor inside Photo AI -> Vibe coded my own photo editor (saves ~$100/mo)
- Mapbox -> Vibecoded my own free replacement with OpenFreeMaps (saves ~$500/mo)
- Uptimerobot -> My own $5/mo Uptime Canary app running on Kuma (saves ~$50/mo)
- Ghost blog -> My own $0/mo blog platform
- Customer support -> @featurebasehq + AI support bot (saves $5,000/mo)
- Scrapingbee/SerpAPI -> My own $1/mo scraper with Patchright (save ~$250/mo)
I think I have reached my final limit of replacing my SaaS services as I have these left, but that'd mean becoming an ICANN registrar (I don't want 😁), managing my own email (I don't want), managing my own hard drives at home in a storage (I don't want) and managing my own servers at home too (I don't want) and running my own GPU rig at home (I don't want):
- Cloudflare Domains
- Cloudflare Email Sending
- Cloudflare R2 Storage
- Backblaze B2 for backups
- Hetzner for all my servers for all my sites (VPS)
- xAI for all LLMs for all my sites (so many things like moderation, writing emails, anything)
John Ho stopped choosing destinations for the destination. Paris and the pyramids versus a local who shows you how they live. He picks by who he knows there.
Founder of Alt Coliving in Chiang Mai, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
What decides your next city: the place, or the people?
#digitalnomad #slowtravel #travelfriends #chiangmai #nerdontour
5 USD for two days of work. That was Dima Pashutskii's first Upwork job, taken only to get a review. Then three to four months and a cap of 60 applications a month before a real client. He would not recommend Upwork. How did you land your first remote client?
Dima went from stationary sysadmin to nomad software engineer. His full story: nerdontour.net/dima-pashutsk…
How do you pick the next city? Four of my guests use very different rules.
John Ho picks by people, not sights. A local who shows him their life beats Paris or the pyramids.
Fajar Siddiq has three rules: somewhere in ASEAN, halal food easy to find, and one person he already knows there.
Ramón Morcillo stays in Southeast Asia because it is life on easy mode: warm, great food, fast internet. A stranger once returned his dropped phone five minutes later.
Benjamin Lupton did the math: about 1,250 USD a month for a dingy flat in Sydney, 500 USD in Kuala Lumpur for a new one with gym and pool.
What is your first rule?
Anne Kuppens was promised fiber when she bought the Nine building in Tenerife. The day after she got the keys, the installer told her the historical street was not connected.
Founder of Nine Coliving, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
What did a landlord or seller promise you about the internet that was not true?
#digitalnomad #coliving #tenerife #wifi #nerdontour
Ramon Morcillo on Southeast Asia: warm all year, great food, internet crazy good compared to Europe. Keys left in the motorbike, laptop on a cafe terrace, and a stranger returned his dropped phone five minutes later. Life on Easy Mode.
Mapmelon co-founder, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
Where is your Easy Mode?
#digitalnomad #southeastasia #slowtravel #remotework #nerdontour
In Jordan, at age 18, on his first solo trip. Muhammed Alard carried 4,000 USD meant for his university tuition.
It was stolen. He went home depressed and enrolled at a university in Saudi Arabia instead.
Today he runs Arab Nomad Fest. He grew up with a Syrian passport most borders treat as a problem, and he still built a life on the road.
What went wrong on your first trip, and what do you do differently now?
Muhammed on a Syrian passport, Arab Nomad Fest and life in Vietnam: nerdontour.net/muhammed-alar…
Ryan Li researched a Bank of America branch in Tokyo. He arrived to find it closed. The money came as a cashier's check in the mail, he deposited it in a Japanese bank, and he never banked in the US again.
20 years in Asia, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
Which bank account do you regret closing?
#digitalnomad #expatlife #japan #banking #nerdontour
Seven screens around his desk. That was Ryan Li's setup before he started moving every few months. Now it is one MacBook, one laptop running Qubes OS, GrapheneOS on the phone, and work kept apart from personal. How many devices do you travel with?
Where my guests live is often decided by a visa, not by the city.
Ramón Morcillo: Thailand's DTV, about 100 USD for five years, leave roughly once a year. He showed about 15,000 USD once and a portfolio instead of a job contract.
Dima Pashutskii on a Russian passport: 90 days at a time in Europe, an Australian visa refused, and Japan only through an application from home. So Southeast Asia most of the year.
Guillaume Lorain: working holiday visas end at 28 for the US and at 30 for Australia. At 29 it was now or never.
Benjamin Lupton built a spreadsheet of visa and tax rules for every country he considered. Kuala Lumpur won with three-month entries.
Mateusz Urbanowicz could only quit his anime studio job once he married. Until then his Japan visa depended on that job.
Rules change, so check the current ones. Which visa decided where you live?
Ana Baute, born in Tenerife: we need fewer tourists and more quality. People who stay, go to local places and learn the culture, not sun-and-pool tourism driven by cheap flights.
Bencomo Coliving owner, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
Do you stay long enough to be the good kind of visitor?
#digitalnomad #slowtravel #overtourism #tenerife #nerdontour
Piotrek Bodera retweeted
TrustMRR a year ago:
- a vibe-coded leaderboard
TrustMRR now:
- 4,000,000 visitors
- 208 startups acquired
- $427,610 in revenue (90% margin)
- several multi-million acquisition offers rejected
Happy 1st birthday, TrustMRR.com 🎂
Bye Bye fake MRR screenshots 👋
I built TrustMRR.com, the database of verified startup revenues.
1. Upload a read-only Stripe API key
2. Get a free page showing your verified revenue
3. And a nice dofollow backlink as a bonus
There's no way to game the system. It's all running on my server, and users can't edit the revenue data.
+ It comes with the leaderboard of startups with the most revenue in the last 30 days.
Go get verified!
Piotrek Bodera retweeted
No matter how good your job is, you are always one meeting away from your entire life changing without your permission.
Bali, by a pool near Poppies Lane. Fajar Siddiq logs into his server and finds 20,000 folders he never created. Client sites are down.
It was an SQL injection. He deleted the folders. They came back.
The fix: back up everything, delete the folders, then search until he found what had been injected into the database. It cost him about a month of the trip, and he was still cleaning up after he flew home.
What I took from it: your backups should be restorable from a hotel room, not only from your desk at home. What broke for you at the worst possible moment on the road?
Fajar went from pro yo-yo player to maker and nomad. His episode: nerdontour.net/fajar-siddiq-…
