Family List App

As a family for birthdays and Christmas we had used email chains as a way for people to provide wishlists. This worked fine, but ended up being chaotic and hard to follow, so back in 2019 I created a next.js app that allowed people to create a wishlist and other family members to claim items on those wishlists.

This app worked great, but it was a bit thrown together and not the easiest to change, with the bigger problem being it was a bit of a pain to deploy. It worked without issue for 3 or so years before I came back to it and decided to swap over to a more serverless approach.

I had decided to go serverless because its has very sporadic usage, essentially its mostly used around christmas, with a few people adding lists throughout the year for their birthdays. Previously I had it running in a VPS which was a fixed cost every month, which meant it cost $60 a year.

It now runs on AWS using DynamoDB for data storage, and S3 for its hosting, and its costs are now around $0.50 a month. (I am splitting the ~$1.00 bill I get from AWS that has both the List app and the recipe app)

Its source sode can be found at the Family List App Github and is composed of a React App, NodeJS lambdas and a bunch of Terraform.