You can build and launch a complete SaaS product without spending a dollar on infrastructure. This guide gives you the opinionated "just tell me what to use" answer — the best free tier for each layer of a SaaS stack, with exact limits for each. 15 of 43 figures in the tables below come from our records for 1,580 developer tools.
Every recommendation includes alternatives, "when you'll outgrow it" guidance, "why not X" callouts for popular-but-not-recommended options, and stability notes based on our tracking of 424 real pricing changes. The limits on this page were read from vendor pricing pages between 2026-08-11 and 2026-10-06.
TL;DR — The $0/Month SaaS Stack
If you're building a SaaS today, use these. Each one is the best free option in its category:
Its Free plan opens with a 30-day trial carrying $5 of credits, then $1 of free credit a month, with auto-deploy from GitHub. Supports any language/framework via Nixpacks or Dockerfile. No cold starts — your service stays warm. Includes free Postgres and Redis add-ons. Best DX: instant deploys, logs, and metrics in one dashboard.
Free $0 per month. Start with a 30-day free trial with $5 credits, then $1 per month. Up to 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB RAM per service. 0.5 GB of volume storage. 2 replicas during the free trial, then 1. Projects: 5 during trial…
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed the $5 of usage that Hobby's $5/month includes (1-2 services). Vercel is best for Next.js (100 GB bandwidth, but bans commercial use on Hobby plan — you must upgrade to Pro at $20/seat/month when you launch your SaaS). Render offers a free tier with 750 hours/month but spins down after 15 min inactivity. Cloudflare Pages is best for static/Jamstack with unlimited bandwidth.
⚠️ Why not Heroku: No free tier since November 2022. Why not Vercel Hobby: Bans commercial use — the moment your SaaS charges users, you owe $20/seat/month. Great for prototyping, but plan for the upgrade. Why not AWS/GCP/Azure directly: Free tiers exist but are complex to configure. AWS credits last 6 months; GCP has $300 in credit plus always-free products; Azure offers free services for 12 months to new customers.
Serverless Postgres. Free plan: 1 GB of storage and 100 CU-hours per project, up to 100 projects and 20 GB of storage in total, scales to zero after 5 minutes idle. Branching for preview environments. Works with every ORM (Prisma, Drizzle, TypeORM, SQLAlchemy, pgx). Connection pooling handles concurrent users efficiently.
Serverless Postgres with branching — free tier includes 100 CU-hours/month per project, 1 GB of Postgres storage per project (20 GB total across all projects), up to 100 projects, 10 branches per project, Neon Auth (60K…
No longer a free-tier pick: CockroachDB — free tier removed.
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 1 GB of storage or need always-on compute. Supabase gives 500 MB Postgres with auth + storage + realtime bundled (pauses after 1 week inactive). Turso provides 5 GB edge SQLite — great for read-heavy, globally distributed apps.
⚠️ Why not MongoDB Atlas: 512 MB free, but document databases add complexity for SaaS (no joins, denormalized data, eventual consistency). Why not PlanetScale: Removed free tier in April 2024.
50,000 monthly retained users free — the most generous managed auth for SaaS. Drop-in React/Next.js components for login, signup, user profile, and organization management. Social login, MFA, and RBAC included. Organizations feature (multi-tenant SaaS) available on free tier. Webhooks for syncing user data to your database.
Drop-in auth with 50K monthly retained users free, unlimited apps
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 50K retained users. Auth0 offers 25,000 MAU with enterprise features (M2M tokens, SSO). Kinde gives 10,500 MAU with feature flags bundled. Supabase Auth provides 50,000 MAU if you're already using Supabase for your database. At 100,000 users: Clerk costs $1,025 a month; Supabase costs $25 a month on Pro.
⚠️ Why not Firebase Auth: email and social sign-in are free, but SMS needs the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan, and MFA, SAML and multi-tenancy need the Identity Platform upgrade. Supabase Auth is a better à la carte option. Why not rolling your own: Auth is the #1 source of security vulnerabilities in SaaS. Password reset, email verification, rate limiting, session management, CSRF — auth providers handle all of this. Only roll your own if you have dedicated security expertise.
RecommendedStripeNo monthly fee — 2.9% + 30¢/txnunrated — not a free offer
The default SaaS billing platform. No monthly fees — only 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction. Subscriptions, usage-based billing, invoicing, tax calculation, customer portal, and webhooks. Every SaaS billing library (Stripe.js, @stripe/stripe-js) is built for Stripe first. Start collecting revenue on day one with zero fixed costs.
Payment processing — no monthly fees, 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Full API, dashboard, and test mode free. Pay only when processing live payments
When you'll outgrow it: You don't outgrow Stripe — it scales to billions. Consider Lemon Squeezy ($0 fixed + 5% + 50¢) if you need a Merchant of Record (handles sales tax, VAT, and compliance globally — you receive net payouts). Paddle (5% + 50¢) is the enterprise MoR alternative. The trade-off: MoR services charge higher per-transaction fees but eliminate tax/compliance complexity.
⚠️ Why not PayPal: Higher fees, worse developer experience, no native subscription billing. Why not building your own billing: Subscription billing has edge cases (proration, dunning, tax compliance, refunds, upgrades/downgrades) that take months to build correctly. Stripe handles all of this. Why not free alternatives: There aren't any — payment processing requires financial infrastructure.
3,000 emails/month free with a modern, developer-first API. React Email for templates — write email templates in JSX. Clean SDK, excellent deliverability, and webhook notifications for bounces and complaints. The new standard for SaaS transactional email (welcome emails, password resets, invoice notifications, team invitations).
Developer-first email API — 3K emails/month free (100/day cap), 3 domains, 1K marketing contacts/month, 5 AI credits, 30-day data retention
No longer a free-tier pick: Amazon SES — free tier removed.
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 3,000 emails/month or 100/day. Brevo gives 300 emails/day (9,000/month) with marketing automation included — good for SaaS that needs both transactional and newsletter email.
⚠️ Why not SendGrid: Free tier removed May 2025. Many tutorials still reference it — those are outdated. Postmark has the best deliverability but costs $15/mo for 10K emails.
10 GB storage with zero egress fees — the only major storage provider that doesn't charge for bandwidth. S3-compatible API works with every SDK and library. For SaaS, this means user uploads (avatars, documents, images) cost nothing to serve, no matter how many times they're downloaded. No surprise bandwidth bills.
Object storage with zero egress fees — 10 GB storage, 1M writes, 10M reads/month free.
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 10 GB storage or 1M Class A operations/month. R2's zero-egress model means the constraint is storage volume, not bandwidth — a SaaS serving 1 TB of user files still pays $0 in egress. At scale: 100 GB stored and 100 GB served costs $1.50/mo on R2 and $2.30/mo on S3, because S3's first 100 GB of egress each month is free on any account and that is the whole of this workload; past it S3 charges $0.09/GB. Backblaze B2 offers 10 GB free and free egress up to 3x what you store, no CDN required.
⚠️ Why not AWS S3: new accounts get no free storage, only Free plan credits that last at most 6 months; then storage costs $0.023/GB-month. Bandwidth is the part that does not expire — AWS S3 gives every account its first 100 GB of internet egress each month free, on an account of any age — so a SaaS serving under 100 GB of user files a month pays nothing for egress on S3 either. Past that S3 charges $0.09/GB and R2 charges $0, forever. Why not Vercel Blob: 250 MB free — too small for most SaaS file storage needs.
5,000 errors/month, 10,000 performance transactions, 50 session replays, 1 GB attachments — all free. Best-in-class error tracking with stack traces, release tracking, and user context. Integrates with every framework (Next.js, Django, FastAPI, Go, Rails). Session replay shows you exactly what the user saw when the error occurred.
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 5,000 errors/month (fix your bugs first). For full observability beyond error tracking: Grafana Cloud offers 10K metrics series + 50 GB logs + 50 GB traces free. New Relic gives 100 GB data ingest/month (most generous, but limited to 1 user). BetterStack combines uptime monitoring with incident management.
⚠️ Why not Datadog: Free tier has 1-day metric retention — practically unusable. Per-host pricing ($15/host/month) gets expensive fast. Why not just console.log: You'll miss errors in production, have no alerting, and can't see trends. Sentry catches errors you didn't know about.
2,000 minutes/month for private repos, unlimited for public. Deep GitHub integration — trigger on push, PR, schedule, or manual dispatch. Massive marketplace of community actions for testing, linting, deploying, and security scanning. Matrix testing across Node/Python/Go versions. Cache dependencies to cut build times by 50-80%.
Free CI/CD for public repos (unlimited minutes). Private repos: 2,000 min/mo GitHub-hosted runners, 500 MB artifact storage, 10 GB cache/repo. Self-hosted runners remain free — planned $0.002/min charge was postponed…
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 2,000 minutes/month on private repos. Self-hosted runners are free. Railway and Vercel auto-deploy from git — combine with GitHub Actions for tests only to conserve minutes.
1M events/month, 5K session replays, feature flags, and A/B testing — all free. The most comprehensive product analytics platform for SaaS. Track user journeys, measure feature adoption, run experiments, and manage feature rollouts. Self-hostable (open source). GDPR-friendly with EU hosting option.
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 1M events/month — typically at 10K-50K active users depending on event density. Plausible (self-hosted) is free with unlimited events but only covers web analytics (no funnels, no feature flags). Umami (self-hosted) is similar. For SaaS, PostHog's product analytics + feature flags combination is hard to beat.
⚠️ Why not Google Analytics: Privacy concerns, complex setup, no feature flags or session replay. Many SaaS users block GA. Why not Mixpanel: Free tier is generous (20M events) but no session replay, feature flags, or A/B testing. PostHog bundles everything.
Free tier: 25,000 function runs/month with 5 concurrent steps. Durable workflow orchestration — retries, scheduling, fan-out, and step functions. TypeScript-first with Next.js integration. No infrastructure to manage — send an event, Inngest runs your function reliably. Perfect for SaaS: onboarding workflows, scheduled reports, webhook processing, billing reconciliation.
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 25,000 runs/month. Trigger.dev offers 10,000 runs/month free with a similar developer experience. For simpler needs: Upstash QStash (1,000 messages/day free) provides HTTP-based async messaging — send a POST, it delivers reliably with retries. For self-managed: BullMQ (Redis-backed) with Upstash Redis (500K commands/month) handles moderate queue needs.
⚠️ Why not cron jobs alone: Cron doesn't retry failures, handle concurrency limits, or provide observability. Why not AWS SQS/Lambda: Complex setup. Inngest and Trigger.dev give you managed, durable execution with a serverless DX.
Stability Notes
Recent pricing changes affecting vendors in this stack. Based on our tracking of 424 deal changes across 1,580+ developer tools.
limits increasedNeon: Neon raised the Free plan's Postgres storage from 0.5 GB to 1 GB per project and added a limit of 20 GB across all of an account's projects. Source ↗
free tier removedCockroachDB: CockroachDB stopped offering its free Basic plan (50 million RUs and 10 GiB of storage free per month) to new deployments on 2026-09-15, ... Source ↗
pricing restructuredRender: Render replaced its workspace plans. Bandwidth for the Hobby tier went from 100 GB to 5 GB included per month, then $0.15 per GB, and Hob... Source ↗
limits increasedNeon: Neon's Free plan went from one member per organization to unlimited members. Source ↗
pricing restructuredVercel: New Pro projects now default to Turbo build machines (30 vCPUs, 60GB memory) at $0.126/minute — 9x more expensive than Standard machines ... Source ↗
pricing postponedGitHub Actions: Self-hosted runner per-minute fee ($0.002/min) announced for March 2026 was postponed indefinitely after community backlash. Self-hosted ... Source ↗
pricing restructuredVercel: Pro plan moved to credit-based model ($20/mo credit pool), Hobby plan metrics renamed and restructured — bandwidth→Fast Data Transfer, se... Source ↗
limits increasedNeon: Neon raised the Free plan's project limit from 80 to 100, the last of seven increases since 2025-08-29, when the limit was 10. Source ↗
limits increasedNeon: Neon made Neon Auth available on all plans, including Free. Source ↗
limits increasedAuth0: Auth0 increased free tier from 7,500 to 25,000 monthly active users. Largest free tier expansion since Okta acquisition. Makes Auth0 comp... Source ↗
limits increasedNeon: Neon doubled the Free plan's compute from 50 to 100 CU-hours per project a month. Source ↗
new free tierRailway: Railway added a Free plan: after the 30-day trial, $1 of free credit a month. It first appears in the Internet Archive's 2025-09-03 captu... Source ↗
What you'll spend at each scale milestone. The most expensive moment is the first upgrade — plan for it.
Scale
Users
Monthly Cost
What Changes
🚀 Launch
0-500
$0/mo
Everything on free tiers. Stripe charges only per transaction.
📈 Traction
1K-5K
$40-80/mo
Database and hosting are the first upgrades. Email may hit limit at 3K sends/month. Auth, analytics, monitoring still free.
🔥 Growth
10K-25K
$150-300/mo
Email upgrade ($20), analytics may exceed 1M events, monitoring upgrade ($26). Auth still free (Clerk 50K, Auth0 25K). Hosting scales with usage.
🏢 Scale
50K-100K
$500-1,500/mo
All services on paid tiers. Auth exceeds free limits. Database at Scale tier ($69). Analytics, monitoring, background jobs all paid. But at 100K users, you should have significant revenue.
The first paid upgrade: Database (Neon Launch, usage-based, no monthly minimum) is the first upgrade most SaaS products need — 1 GB fills up fast with user data, session logs, and analytics tables. Everything else stays free much longer. Auth (Clerk 50K free) and analytics (PostHog 1M events) typically last until 10K+ active users. Key insight: at every scale point, your infrastructure cost should be <10% of revenue. If you're charging $10/user/month, 100 users = $1,000 MRR — more than enough to cover $40-80/month in infrastructure.
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