I see founders spending 200 to 500 pounds per month on tools before they have a single paying customer. Hosting plans they do not need. Analytics platforms built for enterprise teams. Premium tiers of tools where the free version would be fine. It is money that could be spent on marketing, or better yet, kept in the bank as runway.
Here is the cheapest possible stack for building and running a real SaaS product in 2026. Not a toy. Not a prototype. A production application that can handle paying customers, process payments, send emails, and give you the data you need to grow. Total monthly cost: under 20 pounds. In many cases, zero.
The stack
Frontend and hosting: Vercel (free)
Vercel's free tier gives you everything you need to host a Next.js application. Automatic deployments from GitHub, preview URLs for every pull request, serverless functions, and enough bandwidth for thousands of users. You do not need a paid hosting plan until you are processing serious traffic. I ran Fewer Tools on Vercel's free tier for the first several months.
Backend and database: Supabase (free)
Supabase replaces what would normally be three or four separate services. You get a Postgres database with 500MB of storage, authentication with social logins, file storage with 1GB capacity, edge functions for serverless compute, and real-time subscriptions. All free. The database alone would cost you money on AWS or PlanetScale.
Payments: Stripe (pay as you go)
Stripe charges nothing until you process a transaction. No monthly fee. No setup cost. 2.9% + 30 cents per successful charge (1.5% + 25p for UK cards). Your payment infrastructure costs exactly zero until customers start paying you, which is how it should be.
Email: Resend (free)
Resend gives you 3,000 emails per month for free. For transactional emails (welcome emails, password resets, payment confirmations), that covers a significant number of users. The API is clean and the deliverability is excellent. You only need to upgrade when your user base grows past the point where 3,000 monthly emails is not enough.
Analytics: PostHog (free)
PostHog's free tier includes 1 million events per month, session recordings, feature flags, and A/B testing. That is enterprise-grade analytics for zero cost. Google Analytics is also free, but PostHog gives you product analytics that actually help you understand user behaviour, not just traffic numbers.
Error tracking: Sentry (free)
Sentry's free developer plan gives you 5,000 errors per month with full stack traces, breadcrumbs, and issue tracking. When something breaks in production (and it will), you need to know immediately. Sentry catches errors you would never find on your own and gives you the context to fix them fast.
Domain and DNS: Cloudflare (free) + domain (~10 pounds/year)
Cloudflare provides free DNS hosting, CDN, DDoS protection, and SSL. The only cost is the domain itself, which runs about 10 pounds per year for a .com. Point your domain at Cloudflare, then at Vercel, and you have a production-grade setup that rivals what companies pay thousands for.
Version control and CI/CD: GitHub (free)
GitHub free gives you unlimited private repos, 2,000 GitHub Actions minutes per month, and project boards. Your entire development workflow lives here for free. The Actions minutes are enough to run tests, lint code, and deploy automatically on every push.
Project management: Linear (free) or Notion (free)
Linear's free tier handles up to 250 issues. Notion's free tier gives you unlimited pages. For a solo founder or a team of two, either one is more than enough to track work without paying. Pick one, not both. You do not need two project management tools.
The total cost breakdown
- Hosting (Vercel): Free
- Database + Auth + Storage (Supabase): Free
- Payments (Stripe): 0 until first sale, then percentage of revenue
- Email (Resend): Free (3,000/month)
- Analytics (PostHog): Free (1M events/month)
- Error tracking (Sentry): Free (5K errors/month)
- DNS + CDN (Cloudflare): Free
- Code hosting (GitHub): Free
- Project management (Linear/Notion): Free
- Domain: ~10 pounds/year (~0.83/month)
Total: under 1 pound per month. The only fixed cost is your domain name. Everything else is free until your product grows enough to need paid tiers, at which point you will have revenue to cover it.
What about AI tools?
If you are writing code yourself, Cursor's free tier gives you a meaningful number of AI completions and chat messages. If you need more, the Pro plan is $20/month, but that is a development productivity tool, not infrastructure. It pays for itself in saved time within the first week.
Where people waste money
The biggest money pits I see for early-stage founders:
- Paying for Vercel Pro before they need it. The free tier handles more traffic than most early products will see. Upgrade when you hit the limits, not before.
- Using a managed database service. Supabase's free Postgres database is production-ready. You do not need PlanetScale, Neon, or AWS RDS at this stage.
- Buying premium themes or templates. Start with Tailwind CSS and a free component library. Premium templates look good in the demo but always need heavy customisation anyway.
- Running multiple analytics tools. PostHog does what most founders need. You do not also need Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Hotjar.
- Paying for customer support software before having customers. An email inbox handles support for your first 100 customers. Intercom can wait.
When to start paying
The rule is simple: upgrade when a free tier limit actually blocks you, not when you think you might hit it someday. Most founders upgrade too early because they want to feel professional. Your customers do not care whether you are on a free or paid plan. They care whether your product solves their problem.
The first thing worth paying for is usually Cursor Pro or a similar AI coding tool, because it directly saves you time. The second is typically Supabase Pro when you need more database storage or higher function limits. Everything else can stay free for a surprisingly long time.
Use our Calculator to estimate the exact cost of your stack based on your expected usage, or let the Stack Builder recommend tools for your budget.