In this episode of the MakerKit Podcast, I talk with Zach Kazanski, founder of Sherpa.sh – a bootstrapped platform-as-a-service built on top of MakerKit that’s quietly competing with giants like Vercel, Netlify, and AWS.
Zach went from unpaid intern to CTO of a global hosting company that exited to private equity, then went on to bootstrap Sherpa.
His bet: most SaaS apps don’t need serverless, and founders are overpaying 5–10x for hosting because everything is built on top of AWS.
We dig into:
How Zach went from intern to CTO and through a private equity exit
The pricing arbitrage between AWS, metal, and PaaS that Sherpa is exploiting
Serverless vs serverful for typical SaaS apps (especially Next.js & MakerKit apps)
Why Sherpa builds directly on bare metal in EU data centers
How a tiny team uses AI agents and MCP to do what used to require a full DevOps org
The channels that actually worked to get Sherpa’s first customers (and which totally flopped)
Why Reddit + memes outperformed YouTube and Indie Hackers for them
The rise of “vibe coders” and why MakerKit is a natural foundation for AI-assisted development
Zach’s advice for bootstrappers: validating ideas, getting people to pay before you write code, and shipping with “holes”
If you’re a bootstrapped founder, indie hacker, or vibe coder trying to build a SaaS on a realistic budget, this one will hit home.