A founder came to me last month with a familiar problem. They had an idea for a SaaS product, a rough prototype, and absolutely no idea which tools to use for hosting, database, authentication, payments, email, or analytics. They'd spent two weeks reading comparison articles and were more confused than when they started.
I set up their entire stack in 5 days. Six tools. Total cost at launch: zero. Cost at scale (thousands of users): under £89/month. Here's exactly what I picked, why, and how long each piece took.
The final stack
No bloat. No tools they'll outgrow in 3 months. No enterprise pricing for a product that doesn't have users yet. Just the right tools, configured properly, ready to ship.
The 5-day breakdown
Day 1 Hosting & deployment -- Vercel
Setup time: 2 hours
Vercel was the obvious choice here. The founder was building with Next.js, and Vercel is where Next.js lives. But even if they weren't using Next.js, Vercel would still be my recommendation for most SaaS products.
Why not Netlify? Netlify is excellent for static sites, but for anything with server-side rendering, API routes, or middleware, Vercel's integration is tighter and the developer experience is noticeably better. Why not AWS or Railway? At this stage, they'd be paying for complexity they don't need. Vercel's free tier handles 100GB bandwidth and unlimited deployments. They won't hit those limits for months.
What I set up: GitHub integration for automatic deploys on push, preview deployments for pull requests, custom domain with automatic SSL, and environment variables for the rest of the stack. Two hours, including DNS propagation.
Cost at launch: £0. Cost at scale: £16/month (Pro plan, when they need more bandwidth and team features).
Day 2 Database & authentication -- Supabase
Setup time: 6 hours
This was the biggest decision and the most time-intensive setup. Database and auth are the foundation of any SaaS -- get this wrong and you're rebuilding later.
I chose Supabase over Firebase for three reasons. First, PostgreSQL. Firebase uses a NoSQL document model that feels fast at first but becomes a nightmare when you need to query across collections or add complex relationships. PostgreSQL scales and your data model stays sane. Second, Supabase includes authentication out of the box -- email/password, magic links, OAuth with Google, GitHub, etc. That's one fewer tool to manage. No Auth0, no Clerk, no separate auth service. Third, row-level security. With Supabase's RLS policies, your security logic lives in the database. No middleware spaghetti.
What I set up: database schema with proper tables and relationships, RLS policies for multi-tenant data isolation, authentication flows (sign up, sign in, password reset, OAuth), storage bucket for user uploads, and real-time subscriptions for live data updates. Six hours for the full setup, including testing every auth flow end-to-end.
Cost at launch: £0 (free tier: 500MB database, 50,000 auth users, 1GB storage). Cost at scale: £20/month (Pro plan).
Day 3 Payments -- Stripe
Setup time: 4 hours
There's no real alternative to Stripe for SaaS payments in 2026. Paddle and LemonSqueezy are options if you want a merchant of record (they handle VAT), but for most UK/US-based SaaS products, Stripe gives you the most flexibility and the best developer experience.
What I set up: Stripe account with product and pricing configured (monthly and annual plans), Checkout sessions for the subscription flow (no custom payment form needed -- Stripe's hosted checkout converts better anyway), webhook endpoints to sync subscription status with Supabase, customer portal so users can manage their own billing, and a simple licensing gate in the app to check subscription status.
The webhook setup is where most founders get stuck. Getting Stripe events to reliably update your database is fiddly the first time. It took me about 90 minutes because I've done it dozens of times. First time? Budget half a day.
Cost at launch: £0 (Stripe only charges per transaction: 1.5% + 20p for UK cards). Cost at scale: Still pay-as-you-go. At £10,000 MRR, you're paying roughly £170/month in Stripe fees.
Day 4 Email -- Resend + Beehiiv
Setup time: 3 hours
Most founders conflate two very different email needs: transactional email (password resets, welcome emails, receipts) and marketing email (newsletters, product updates, nurture sequences). Using one tool for both is a mistake. Deliverability requirements are different, and the best tools for each are completely separate.
Transactional: Resend. Resend is built for developers. You send emails with a simple API call, and you can build templates with React components if you're already in that ecosystem. No drag-and-drop builder, no bloated dashboard. Just email that arrives in the inbox. Setup: API key, domain verification (DNS records), and a few email templates. One hour.
Marketing: Beehiiv. For the product's newsletter and user communications, Beehiiv is the clear winner over Mailchimp or ConvertKit. Free up to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends. Built-in referral programme. Web-hosted archive pages that are great for SEO. And no per-subscriber pricing cliff that punishes you for growing. Setup: account creation, custom domain, welcome sequence, and import template. Two hours.
Cost at launch: £0 for both. Cost at scale: Resend £16/month (50,000 emails), Beehiiv £34/month (Scale plan at 2,500+ subscribers).
Day 5 Analytics -- PostHog
Setup time: 2 hours
PostHog has quietly become the best analytics tool for SaaS products. It's not just pageview tracking -- it's product analytics, session recordings, feature flags, and A/B testing in one platform. That's four tools replaced by one.
Why not Google Analytics? GA4 is designed for marketing websites, not SaaS products. You can't easily track user journeys through your app, set up funnels based on product events, or watch session recordings. PostHog does all of this natively. Why not Mixpanel? Mixpanel is excellent but expensive once you pass the free tier. PostHog's free tier is 1 million events per month -- most early-stage SaaS products won't hit that for a year.
What I set up: PostHog JS snippet on all pages, custom events for key product actions (sign up, subscription started, feature used), a basic product dashboard with retention, activation, and revenue metrics, and session recording enabled for debugging user issues. Two hours, and they immediately had more insight into their product than most funded startups.
Cost at launch: £0 (1M events/month free). Cost at scale: £0-3/month for most SaaS products under 10,000 users.
The total cost breakdown
At launch with zero users, this entire stack costs £0/month. Every tool is on its free tier, and every free tier is generous enough to last months.
At scale -- say, 5,000 users and £10,000 MRR -- the costs look like this:
- Vercel Pro: £16/month
- Supabase Pro: £20/month
- Stripe fees: ~£170/month (percentage of revenue)
- Resend: £16/month
- PostHog: £0-3/month
- Beehiiv Scale: £34/month
Total: £86-89/month (excluding Stripe's transaction fees, which scale with revenue). That's infrastructure for a real SaaS business, for less than most founders spend on a single tool they don't need.
What this would have cost without help
The founder told me they'd already spent two weeks researching tools before reaching out. Fourteen days of reading blog posts, watching YouTube comparisons, signing up for free trials, and second-guessing every decision. At a conservative estimate, that's 40+ hours of research time -- time they could have spent building their product.
And they still hadn't made a decision.
This is the hidden cost that nobody accounts for. The tools themselves are often free or cheap. The expensive part is the time spent choosing them, the mistakes made from choosing wrong, and the migrations when you realise you need to switch. I've seen founders lose entire months to this cycle.
Get your stack set up right the first time
If you're starting a new project and want to skip the 40 hours of research, here's how I can help:
- Build your stack -- use our free Stack Builder to get instant tool recommendations based on your project type, team size, and budget.
- Get the blueprint -- a personalised stack recommendation with exact tools, configuration notes, and cost projections. Built by hand, delivered in 48 hours.
- Want this done for you? -- I'll set up your entire stack, exactly like this case study. You focus on building your product. I handle the infrastructure.
The best time to get your stack right is before you start building. The second best time is right now, before the wrong choices compound into weeks of migration work later.
Six tools. Five days. Under £89/month at scale. That's all you need.