Budget Startup Stack Guide for Solo Developers

The Stack

This is the zero-dollar stack. Every component has a generous free tier that covers development, launch, and your first few hundred users. The entire point is to validate your idea and get to revenue without spending a cent on infrastructure.

When to Use This Stack

Perfect for: MVPs, side projects you're validating, first-time SaaS builders who don't want financial risk, bootstrapped products where every dollar matters.

Not ideal for: Products that need heavy backend processing (the free tiers have compute limits), apps requiring more than 500MB of database storage, or high-traffic applications from day one.

This stack is for the "I'm not sure if this will work" phase. Once you've validated and have paying customers, you can upgrade individual services as needed. But there's no reason to pay for infrastructure before you have product-market fit.

Why Solo Developers Love It

Zero financial risk. The hardest part of starting a product isn't the code. It's the commitment. When your infrastructure costs $0/month, the only thing you're investing is time. If the product fails, you've lost nothing except the hours spent building it. That psychological safety makes it easier to experiment and take risks.

Free doesn't mean bad. Supabase's free tier gives you a real PostgreSQL database with auth, real-time subscriptions, and edge functions. Vercel's free tier handles legitimate production traffic. Resend sends 3,000 emails per month. These aren't crippled demo tiers. They're genuinely usable for production applications with hundreds of users.

Upgrade paths are clear. When you outgrow a free tier, upgrading is straightforward. Supabase Pro is $25/month. Vercel Pro is $20/month. You're not locked into choices that are painful to change. And by the time you need to upgrade, you should have revenue to cover it.

Everything works together. This isn't a random collection of free tools. Supabase + Next.js + Vercel is a well-documented, widely-used combination. There are starter templates, tutorials, and thousands of developers using this exact stack. You won't be debugging obscure integration issues.

The Parts Nobody Warns You About

Free tier limits are real. Supabase pauses inactive databases after 7 days on the free tier. This means if your side project doesn't get traffic for a week, the database goes to sleep and the next request takes 5-10 seconds to wake it up. For a product you're actively building, this isn't an issue. For something you launched and forgot about, it can be jarring.

Vercel's free tier is for personal/hobby projects. Their terms of service specify that the free tier is for non-commercial use. In practice, many indie developers use it for early-stage commercial products, but be aware that you should upgrade to Pro ($20/month) once you're generating revenue.

AuthJS (NextAuth) has a learning curve. It's powerful and free, but the documentation can be confusing, especially around session strategies, callbacks, and adapter configuration. Supabase Auth is simpler to set up if you're already using Supabase.

You're assembling the stack yourself. Unlike a paid starter kit that gives you everything pre-configured, you're wiring these services together manually. Auth flow, database schema, Stripe webhooks, email templates. It's all on you. Budget 1-2 weeks for initial setup before you start building features.

Cold starts on serverless. Both Vercel's serverless functions and Supabase's edge functions have cold start times. The first request after a period of inactivity takes longer. For most applications this is barely noticeable. But if your users are in regions far from your deployment region, cold starts plus network latency can feel sluggish.

Setting Up the Stack

Here's the order I'd follow to get everything running.

Day 1: Framework + Database. Create your Next.js or SvelteKit project. Set up a Supabase project and connect it. Define your initial database schema with migrations. Get basic pages rendering with data from the database.

Day 2: Auth. Set up Supabase Auth or AuthJS. Build login, register, and protected route pages. Verify the auth flow works end to end. This is the most annoying part of setup, so get it done early.

Day 3: Deploy + Email. Deploy to Vercel (connect your GitHub repo). Set up Resend for transactional emails (welcome email, password reset). Verify everything works in production.

Day 4 onwards: Build your product. With infrastructure sorted, every remaining hour goes toward features. Set up Stripe whenever you're ready to monetize (it can wait until you have something worth charging for).

Free Tier Limits at a Glance

Scaling Beyond Free

When you outgrow the free tiers, here's the typical upgrade path and what it costs.

The goal is always: infrastructure costs should be a small fraction of revenue. If you're paying $45/month for infrastructure, you should be making at least $100/month (and ideally much more).

Alternatives to Consider

If you want even cheaper: Cloudflare Pages (free) + Turso (SQLite, free tier) + Lucia Auth (free). This is the absolute minimum-cost stack, trading some developer experience for even lower costs.

If you want more backend power: Railway's free tier gives you 500 hours of compute per month. Enough to run a Django or Express backend alongside a database.

If you want to avoid cloud dependency entirely: Self-host on a $4/month Hetzner VPS with Docker. More setup work but no free tier limits to worry about.

My Take

The budget startup stack isn't about being cheap. It's about being smart. Every dollar you don't spend on infrastructure is a dollar you don't need to earn back before you're profitable. I've seen too many solo developers spend $50-100/month on infrastructure for products that have zero users.

Validate first, then spend. Build your product on free tiers, get your first 10 paying customers, and then upgrade services as needed. By the time you're paying for Supabase Pro and Vercel Pro, you should have enough revenue to cover it several times over.

The biggest risk for any startup isn't infrastructure limitations. It's building something nobody wants. Free tiers let you test ideas quickly without financial commitment. Use that freedom aggressively. Launch, learn, iterate. The infrastructure can scale when the product demands it.