Terraform for Indie Hackers in 2026: 5 Production Templates You Can Deploy in 10 Minutes

You built the product. Now it needs to run somewhere reliable. Manually clicking through AWS consoles works for demos. It breaks at 3 AM. It fails when you need a staging environment. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform fixes all of this. Here are 5 production-ready Terraform templates for indie hackers and solo devs. Why Terraform Over Pulumi/CDK/SST? HCL is readable — even non-devs can review your infra 15,000+ free modules in the registry Providers for everything — AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, Vercel, GitHub 100% free — OpenTofu is the open-source fork with zero lock-in Massive community — every error is already solved on Stack Overflow The 4 Commands You'll Use 95% of the Time terraform init # Download providers terraform plan # Preview changes (ALWAYS run first) terraform apply # Create/update resources terraform destroy # Remove everything Template 1: AWS Minimal SaaS Stack (~$15-30/month) Single server + PostgreSQL. Handles up to ~1K concurrent users. terraform { required_provi