You shipped your SaaS last month. You have users. You have API keys scattered across three services. You have a serverless function you set up at 2am and never reviewed again. Sound familiar? Cloud security gaps don't announce themselves. They grow quietly while you're focused on features.

This isn't about enterprise compliance checklists. This is about the specific, practical ways solo developers and indie hackers leave doors open without realizing it. Let's talk about what actually matters and what you can do this week.

Your API is a Public Billboard for Attackers

Every endpoint you expose is a surface someone can probe. Most indie devs treat APIs as internal tools that happen to be public. That framing is dangerous.

Rate limiting is the first thing skipped when you're moving fast. Without it, a single script can hammer your endpoints thousands of times per minute. That means enumeration attacks, credential stuffing, and resource exhaustion. All free, all automated.

Token scoping is the second gap. A token that can read user data probably shouldn't also be able to delete records. Overly broad tokens are the norm in quick-build projects. When one leaks, and they do leak, the blast radius is massive. Check Have I Been Pwned to see how often credentials from small projects end up in breach dumps.

Here's a minimal Express.js rate limiter setup that takes five minutes to add:

const rateLimit = require('express-rate-limit');

const limiter = rateLimit({
  windowMs: 15 * 60 * 1000, // 15 minutes
  max: 100, // limit each IP to 100 requests per window
  standardHeaders: true,
  legacyHeaders: false,
  message: { error: 'Too many requests, slow down.' }
});

app.use('/api/', limiter);

This won't stop a sophisticated attacker. But it will stop the script-kiddie bots that scan the entire internet daily. That alone eliminates a huge percentage of opportunistic attacks.

IAM Permissions: The Slow-Motion Security Disaster

Identity and Access Management, meaning who and what can access your cloud resources, is where most solo projects have their worst hygiene. It's invisible until something goes wrong.

The Least Privilege Principle (And Why Nobody Follows It)

The rule is simple. Give each service, user, or function only the permissions it needs to do its specific job. Nothing more. In practice, developers grant admin roles to service accounts because it's faster and it works immediately.

Essential Cloud Security Practices

🚦

Implement Rate Limiting
Prevent abuse of your API endpoints.

🔑

Use Token Scoping
Limit token permissions to necessary actions.

🛡️

Review IAM Permissions
Apply least privilege principle for access.

🔒

Secure Secrets Management
Store API keys and secrets safely.

🔗

Monitor Third-Party Integrations
Ensure they meet security standards.

That shortcut means a compromised function that only sends emails suddenly has write access to your database. One leaked key becomes a full breach. The CISA cybersecurity guidelines consistently flag over-permissioned service accounts as one of the top attack vectors in cloud environments.

Audit your permissions quarterly. On Google Cloud, run gcloud projects get-iam-policy YOUR_PROJECT and look for any service account with roles like roles/editor or roles/owner. Those are red flags. On AWS, use IAM Access Analyzer. It's free and it surfaces policies that grant more access than needed.

Service Account Keys Are Almost Always a Mistake

If you have a JSON key file sitting in your repo or on your local machine, that's a liability. Use Workload Identity Federation instead. It lets services authenticate without long-lived credentials. It takes an extra hour to set up. It's worth it.

For solo devs managing multiple cloud projects, keeping track of which key belongs where becomes its own security risk. Consider using a private cloud storage solution like Porton Private Cloud Storage for sensitive credential backups rather than leaving them in unencrypted folders. This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.

Third-Party Integrations Are Borrowed Trust

Every tool you plug into your app carries its own risk profile. Stripe, Twilio, OpenAI, Zapier. Each one gets a token, often with broad permissions, and each one is a potential entry point if their systems or yours are compromised.

The AI integration problem is newer and less understood. When you pipe user input into an external model API, you're sending data somewhere you don't fully control. Some providers log prompts by default. Some use your data for training unless you opt out. Read the terms. Check the Privacy Guides resource for evaluating third-party data handling practices before you integrate.

Here are the questions to ask before adding any third-party integration:

What data does this service receive from my users?
Can I scope the API key to only the actions this integration needs?
What happens to my users if this service goes down or gets breached?
Does this service have a documented security incident history?
Can I rotate the key without downtime?

If you can't answer those questions quickly, the integration isn't ready for production.

Serverless Functions: Convenient and Often Forgotten

Serverless functions, small chunks of code that run in response to events like HTTP requests or queue messages, are a solo dev's best friend for scaling without infrastructure headaches. They're also the part of your stack you're most likely to forget to secure.

The problem is the trigger configuration. A Cloud Function or Lambda that responds to any unauthenticated HTTP request is effectively a public API endpoint with no front door. Many developers set this up for quick testing and never lock it down before going live.

Additionally, the execution role attached to your function matters enormously. A function that only needs to write to one database table should not have access to your entire storage bucket. Review each function's role individually. Don't reuse a single broad role across all functions because it's convenient.

Monitoring is the other blind spot. Functions spin up and disappear in milliseconds. Without structured logging and alerting, you won't notice unusual invocation patterns until a bill arrives or a user complains. Set up log-based alerts on invocation spikes and error rates. This is basic but it catches a lot.

Visibility Is the Actual Security Layer You're Missing

Here's the core problem. Most indie devs have built something complex enough to be exploitable but small enough that formal security tooling feels like overkill. That gap is exactly where attackers look.

Visibility means knowing what your app is doing at any given moment. It means having logs you actually check. It means getting an alert when something unexpected happens, not discovering it in a post-mortem.

Common Security Gaps for Solo Devs

100%

APIs Exposed

70%

Rate Limiting Skipped

80%

Token Mismanagement

Millions

Breach Dumps

A few concrete steps to build visibility without an enterprise budget:

Enable cloud-native audit logging. On GCP, turn on Cloud Audit Logs for all services. On AWS, enable CloudTrail. These are low-cost and give you a record of every API call made in your account.
Set up a billing alert. Unexpected cost spikes often signal cryptomining or DDoS abuse. A $50 alert threshold takes two minutes to configure and has saved many small projects from four-figure surprise bills.
Use a secrets manager. AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secret Manager, or even HashiCorp Vault for self-hosted. Stop putting secrets in environment variables baked into container images.
Run dependency audits weekly. Use npm audit, pip-audit, or bundler-audit depending on your stack. Vulnerable dependencies are a top attack vector in small projects.

When you're analyzing your security posture data and want to track which vulnerabilities are most common across your stack, a percentile calculator can help you rank risk severity across multiple issues quickly. Meanwhile, when you're building internal dashboards to visualize your audit log data, a free online chart maker lets you turn raw numbers into something your stakeholders can actually read.

Protecting Your Dev Setup Beyond the Cloud

Cloud security doesn't stop at your deployment environment. The machine you develop on is also part of the attack surface. Public wifi at a coffee shop, unencrypted DNS queries, man-in-the-middle risks. These are real threats for remote-working solo devs.

If you haven't set up a VPN for your development workflow, read our comprehensive VPN guide to understand what protection you actually need and which solutions make sense for a one-person operation.

Also consider your work environment setup. If you're doing heavy local development, testing containerized builds with Docker, and running multiple VMs, a machine with enough memory and processing power matters. A setup like the High-End Gaming PC Iceflow RGB with RTX 4070 handles containerized workloads and local model inference without bottlenecks.

When your documentation and security runbooks look professional, they actually get used. If you're building visual assets for internal docs or landing pages, a font finder tool helps you match typography quickly without derailing your workflow. And if your security content needs to rank well for your users to find it, check your page performance with a Google Search AI ranking tool to see where you stand.

What to Do This Week

Security doesn't require a complete architecture overhaul. It requires consistent small actions. Here's where to start right now:

Audit every service account in your cloud project and remove any admin or editor roles
Add rate limiting to every public API endpoint you own
Rotate any API keys older than 90 days, starting with third-party integrations
Enable audit logging on your cloud account if it isn't already on
Set a billing alert at 150% of your average monthly spend

The question isn't whether your project is big enough to be a target. Automated bots don't care about your user count. They scan everything. The projects that get hit hardest are the ones that assumed they were too small to matter.

Start with one item on that list today. Check back here on Tools On Fire Insider for follow-up coverage on secrets management tools and cloud security scanners built for solo teams.