0012. Cheap by design

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-10-27

Context

Small shops cannot pay for large servers or managed databases. A hosted fork would also need to fit many shops onto small machines.

Decision

Each tenant gets one SQLite file (better-sqlite3, WAL mode). The server has no required external services: no Postgres, Redis, queue or object storage. Backups can optionally stream to any S3-compatible storage. A resource budget (image size, memory, idle CPU, cold start, bytes per order) is enforced in CI by scripts/budget.ts.

Consequences

• A 512 MB / 1 vCPU VPS, a Raspberry Pi or a NAS can run a shop.
• Tenants are easy to back up, restore and move individually, and cannot leak into each other through a missing filter. Rows still carry tenantId for exports and safety.
• Changes that need more memory or image size must justify it in their pull request.