SaaS Stack Cost Calculator
Pick your tools, choose your tier, and see exactly what your indie stack costs per month — and per year.
Hosting
Database
Authentication
Payments
Monitoring
Analytics
Add tools from the list to see your monthly stack cost.
How Much Does a Typical Solo Dev SaaS Stack Cost?
Running a software product as a solo developer or indie hacker means wearing every hat — and paying for every service. Unlike enterprise teams with dedicated infrastructure budgets, a solo developer has to bootstrap with a tight budget before revenue kicks in. Understanding your stack costs upfront helps you plan your break-even point and avoid bill shock when you scale.
The starter stack: $0–$5/month
Most solo developers can launch a real, production-ready product entirely on free tiers. A lean starter stack might look like: Vercel Hobby (free) for hosting, Supabase Free (free) for the database, Resend Free (free, 3,000 emails/month) for transactional email, Clerk Free (free, up to 10,000 monthly active users) for auth, and PostHog Free (free, 1M events/month) for analytics. Total: $0/month — or $5/month if you add Railway for a backend service.
This isn't a toy setup. These free tiers are genuinely production-ready for early-stage products. Most successful indie hackers run on free tiers until they hit real usage limits — and by then, they have revenue to justify upgrades.
The growth stack: ~$90–$120/month
Once you have paying customers, you'll upgrade a few services to lift limits and add reliability. A typical growth stack: Vercel Pro ($20/mo), Supabase Pro ($25/mo) for daily backups and more storage, Resend Pro ($20/mo) for higher email volume, Sentry Team ($26/mo) for error monitoring, and Clerk Pro ($25/mo) for unlimited MAU. Total: roughly $116/month — or $1,392/year. That's 12–15 paying customers at $10/month covering your entire infrastructure.
Cost-saving tips for indie hackers
1. Start on free tiers and stay there as long as possible. Supabase, Neon, Clerk, and PostHog all have genuinely useful free tiers that let you run a real product with real users at $0/month. Don't upgrade until you hit a limit that actually blocks you.
2. Watch out for per-seat pricing. Tools like Auth0 and some monitoring platforms charge per user or per monthly active user. As your user base grows, these costs grow with it. Always check whether a tool's pricing scales with your success.
3. Choose tools with generous free tiers for email. Resend (3,000 emails/month free) and Postmark (100 test emails) are excellent starting points. Transactional email is often one of the first costs solo devs overlook — but it's also easy to control.
4. Skip paid monitoring until you need it. Sentry's free tier handles 5,000 errors per month, which is plenty for early-stage products. Don't pay $26/month for Team features until you're consistently burning through the free limit.
5. Payments are free until you make money. Stripe and Lemon Squeezy charge per transaction, not per month. Your payment infrastructure costs $0 until you have revenue — which is exactly the right alignment for bootstrapped projects.
Calculate your personal break-even
Use the calculator above to build your exact stack. Once you have a monthly cost, divide it by your product's price to find your customer break-even. For example: if your stack costs $116/month and you charge $19/month, you need 7 paying customers to cover infrastructure. That's an achievable goal for most solo devs within the first few months of launch.
The most successful indie hackers treat SaaS costs like burn rate: track it monthly, optimize it when costs grow faster than revenue, and share your stack with other builders (use the "Copy share link" button in the calculator). Understanding your costs is the first step to running a profitable solo product.