The solo founder stack, priced

Last checked August 2026. Prices are US list prices and move.

What this site actually costs

Not a model, not a survey of what founders say they spend. This is Startup Feedback Exchange’s own bill, which is the only stack whose numbers we can promise are real.

There is no salary in that number, no ad budget, and no office. It is the cost of keeping the lights on for a real product with authentication, a database, transactional email, scheduled jobs and analytics.

The reason to publish it is that most “solo founder stack” posts quote list prices from vendor websites without saying which tiers the author is actually on. The interesting information is in the gap between the list price and what you really pay, and that only shows up in somebody’s invoice.

Which free tiers actually hold

Four of the nine lines above are $0, and they are not trials. These are the free tiers we would recommend building on without reservation:

• Cloudflare DNS and Turnstile. Free at any volume you will reach. Turnstile in particular replaces a paid captcha for nothing and is less annoying for users.
• Resend, to 3,000 emails a month. Enough for a product with a few hundred members. The next step is $20 a month for 50,000, which is a very long way away.
• PostHog, to 1 million events a month. A marketing site plus a small app does not come close. Session replay eats the allowance much faster than events do, so turn it on deliberately rather than by default.
• PageSpeed Insights API, 25,000 requests a day. An entire member-facing feature here runs on it. Worth knowing before you pay for a monitoring product.

And two that are free but with a condition worth reading before you depend on them:

• Supabase free tier. Genuinely production-shaped: real Postgres, real row-level security, auth included. Projects pause after a week of inactivity, which is fine in development and not fine in production, and daily backups only start on Pro at $25 a month.
• Vercel Hobby. Excellent, and explicitly not for commercial use. The moment you charge anyone, you need Pro at $20 a month per user. Budget for it at the same time as Stripe rather than as a surprise.

The four costs that grow fastest

Infrastructure is not what gets expensive. These four are, roughly in the order they will bite you.

1. Payment processing

Stripe is 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction in the US, and there is no volume discount worth having until you are much larger. At $5,000 a month in revenue that is about $175 a month, which is more than every line in the table above put together, every month.

A merchant of record such as Paddle or Lemon Squeezy charges more, around 5% plus a fixed fee, and takes on sales tax and VAT registration in return. If you sell internationally and the alternative is registering for VAT yourself, that spread is usually worth paying. If you sell domestically, it usually is not.

2. Per-seat tooling

The quiet one. Three subscriptions at $20 a month is $720 a year, which is more than this entire stack. It accumulates one reasonable decision at a time and nobody ever cancels anything. Put a calendar reminder in for every six months and actually cancel things.

3. Email, once you send digests

Transactional email is tiny. A weekly digest to a growing list is not: 1,000 members receiving one email a week is 4,000 a month, and you are off the free tier. It jumps from $0 to $20 a month in a single step you will not see coming.

4. AI API calls

The line that scales with usage rather than time, and therefore the only one that can genuinely surprise you. Ours is about $18 a year because it runs weekly on a small amount of text. Anything that calls a model per user action needs a spend cap on day one, before it needs a budget.

What we would pay for before revenue

Short list, because the honest answer for most pre-revenue founders is almost nothing.

• Your domain, on a real registrar. $12 a year. Cloudflare Registrar sells at cost with no renewal markup.
• A sending domain configured properly. Free at Resend’s tier, but spend the hour on SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Deliverability problems are slow to show up, hard to diagnose, and expensive to unwind once your domain has a reputation.
• Backups, the moment you have a user who is not you. This is the argument for Supabase Pro at $25 a month, and it is the only line on our bill we would keep at zero revenue.

Everything else can wait. The prevailing guidance for bootstrapped founders on directory and tooling spend is $0, and we agree with it. Money is not what is limiting you at this stage, and spending it feels productive in a way that is hard to distinguish from being productive.

Who this is not for

If you have a team, this is the wrong reference. Per-seat pricing changes the arithmetic completely and the free tiers stop applying almost immediately.

If you are in a regulated category, healthcare or finance or anything holding payment data directly, the compliance line outweighs everything here and you should be reading about SOC 2 and BAAs rather than hosting bills.

And if you are choosing a stack right now, this is a bill, not a recommendation. The stack you already know is almost always the right one, and the $500 difference between any two reasonable choices is worth far less than the month you would spend learning the other one.

Common questions

This page is maintained rather than dated, and it gets updated when the bill changes. Members appear in it as the network grows: if you run something on this list and the pricing here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. That is roughly how the exchange works in general.