Build an MVP for $50/mo

Hosts the Next.js (or whatever-you-pick) app at the edge with preview URLs per branch.

At MVP scale you're nowhere near the request limits. You get HTTPS, preview deploys, and a custom domain pointed at the build with one click. The push-to-deploy loop is the shortest in the stack and the price is zero.

• Hobby's terms of service exclude commercial use. If a paying customer signs up next week, the honest move is Pro at $20/mo — that single bump pushes the stack toward $65.
• There's no built-in cron at the Hobby tier. Schedule jobs from a free Upstash QStash account or a tiny GitHub Action.
• Edge function logs are short-lived. If you need history, pipe to Better Stack or Axiom early — fishing through expired logs at 2am is a bad time.

SQLite-on-the-edge. Your database lives next to the user, replicated to multiple regions automatically.

$9 covers 9GB of storage and a billion row reads a month — vastly more than an MVP needs. It's a proper SQL database without the connection-pool nightmare you'd have with Postgres on serverless. The local-first tooling means you develop offline against a SQLite file and push to a cloud replica when you're ready.

• It's SQLite, not Postgres. No JSONB, no PostGIS, no row-level security. If you'll need any of those within six months, start on Supabase instead.
• Edge replication is great for reads, slower for writes. Anything write-heavy (analytics events, chat) belongs somewhere else.
• The libSQL client has a smaller ecosystem than pg or mysql — fewer ORMs work cleanly. Drizzle is the safest bet today.

Drop-in auth: email/password, Google, GitHub, magic links — with prebuilt UI components.

Free up to 10,000 monthly active users, which is many MVPs' entire lifetime. The components are ugly but functional out of the box, and the React SDK reads from a hook so you stop writing session middleware. The thing you'd spend a weekend on is finished in twenty minutes.

• 10k MAU is the cliff. The next plan is $25/mo and it's per-MAU after that — at scale Clerk gets expensive fast.
• The UI components are easy to use and hard to customize. Past a certain polish target you'll either restyle aggressively or roll your own forms calling Clerk's API.
• Custom domain for the auth screens (yourdomain.com/sign-in instead of clerk.yourdomain.com) is a Pro-tier feature.

Sends magic-link emails, password resets, receipts — the things that have to land.

3,000 emails per month and 100 per day on the free tier covers an MVP's first six months. The React-email integration means email templates live next to the rest of the codebase instead of in a vendor's WYSIWYG. It's the same provider the SaaS-$100 stack uses paid; you just don't need to pay for it yet.

• 100 emails per day is easy to hit on launch day. If you announce on Hacker News and 200 people sign up, half of them won't get a confirmation email until tomorrow.
• SPF, DKIM, and DMARC still need to be set up correctly. Skipping the DNS work and Resend will deliver to spam, fairly.
• There's no batch broadcast on the free tier — that's a paid feature. The MVP angle is transactional only; broadcast email belongs on Beehiiv.

Accepts card payments and handles VAT, sales tax, and chargebacks as the merchant of record.

Stripe is cheaper per-transaction, but Stripe makes you handle EU VAT, US sales tax, and the paperwork that comes with both. Lemonsqueezy is the merchant of record — they collect, file, and remit on your behalf, and you get a single 1099 from them. For a solo founder, the time saved is worth the 5%+50¢ they take. The flat $29/mo unlocks subscription management and webhooks.

• Their fees (5% + 50¢) are visibly higher than Stripe's (2.9% + 30¢). Past ~$20k MRR the math flips and Stripe + a tax tool wins.
• International coverage is good, not perfect. Some currencies (e.g., INR for Indian-only businesses) are still better served by Razorpay or Stripe.
• Subscription management for customers happens on Lemonsqueezy's portal, not yours. You can deep-link, but the brand split is real.

A .com or .dev or .io domain, registered for a year and amortized to ~$1/mo.

Porkbun and Cloudflare Registrar both offer .com at registrar cost (~$10–12/year) with WHOIS privacy free. Don't pay GoDaddy $20 for the same domain. Keep DNS at the registrar — one fewer DNS provider to log into when something breaks.

• Premium domains (short, English words) are a different price tier — sometimes $500–$10,000 upfront. Unless you have brand equity reasons, pick a name that's a regular registration price.
• Renewal prices are sometimes higher than the first-year price. Check the renewal price, not just the promotional one, before you commit to a TLD.
• Don't park your domain on a registrar's nameservers without TTL knowledge. Switching DNS later means waiting on cache expiry.

Pings your endpoints every 30 seconds, pages you when they go down, and gives you a public status page.

Free tier is generous — 10 monitors, 3-minute checks. The $4 paid tier drops to 30-second checks, adds SMS alerts, and gives you a custom-domain status page. At MVP scale, knowing the site is down before your users tell you is worth the four bucks.

• Free-tier alerts are email-only. If your phone is on Do Not Disturb you'll find out in the morning. Pay the $4 for SMS the moment the site has paying users.
• The default check interval (3 min on free) means a 90-second outage might not register at all.
• Status pages are nice but adoption is low — most users won't check it. Pair it with a Twitter/X or email broadcast for actual outages.