Build a complete SaaS startup on free tiers. 10 infrastructure categories with recommended picks, exact limits, scaling guidance, and stability notes.

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The Complete Free Startup Stack

Published 2026-03-25 · Not yet reviewed

You can build and launch a complete SaaS product without spending a dollar on infrastructure. This guide recommends the best free tier for each layer of a typical startup stack — 10 categories from hosting to analytics — with exact limits for each. Figures in the tables below come from our records for 1,574 developer tools.

Each recommendation includes alternatives, a "when you'll outgrow it" guide, and stability notes based on our tracking of 476 real pricing changes. The limits on this page were read from vendor pricing pages between 2026-07-05 and 2026-09-19.

$0/month
Total estimated monthly cost for the complete stack below
$0 covers the 8 of 10 picks whose free tier our own badge still reads as active. It does not cover PostHog (unrated — change refused), Algolia (at risk).

Stack Overview

Category Recommended Key Limit Stability
🖥️ Hosting & Compute Vercel Hobby plan, $0 a month, for non-commercial personal use only. Includes 100 GB Fast Data Transfer, 1M Edge… active
🗄️ Database Supabase Postgres development platform: database, Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Functions. The Free plan is $0… active
🔐 Authentication Clerk Drop-in auth with 50K monthly retained users free, unlimited apps active
📧 Email & Transactional Resend Developer-first email API — 3K emails/month free (100/day cap), 3 domains, 1K marketing contacts/month, 5 AI… active
📊 Monitoring & Observability New Relic Full observability platform — 100 GB data ingest/month, 1 full platform user, unlimited basic users, 500… active
🔄 CI/CD GitHub Actions Free CI/CD for public repos (unlimited minutes). Private repos: 2,000 min/mo GitHub-hosted runners, 500 MB… active
💾 Object Storage Cloudflare R2 Object storage with zero egress fees — 10 GB storage, 1M writes, 10M reads/month free active
🐛 Error Tracking Sentry Developer tier: 1 user, 5K errors/month, 5M spans/month, 50 session replays, 5GB application logs, 1GB… active
📈 Analytics PostHog Product analytics — 1M events/month, 5K session replays, 1M feature flag requests, 100K error events, A/B… unrated — change refused
🔍 Search Algolia Search-as-a-service. The Free plan needs no credit card and includes 10K search requests/month, 50K records… at risk

🖥️ Hosting & Compute

Recommended Vercel Hobby active

Generous hobby tier with 100 GB bandwidth, 1M function invocations, global edge network. Great DX with Git-based deploys.

Hobby plan, $0 a month, for non-commercial personal use only. Includes 100 GB Fast Data Transfer, 1M Edge Requests, 1M Function Invocations, 4 hours Fluid Active CPU, 360 GB-hrs Fluid Provisioned Memory, 1 GB Blob…

Full profile Alternatives Pricing ↗

Also consider:

Railway Free active Render Hobby at risk Cloudflare Workers Free active Cloudflare Pages Free unrated — change not reconciled Netlify Free at risk
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 100 GB bandwidth/month, need always-on backend processes, or require more than 4 hrs CPU/month.
Full comparison guide →

🗄️ Database

Recommended Supabase Free active

500 MB Postgres + auth + 1 GB storage + realtime subscriptions in one free tier. The bundled BaaS approach saves you from stitching 3 services together.

Postgres development platform: database, Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Functions. The Free plan is $0: unlimited API requests, 50,000 monthly active users, a 500 MB database on a shared CPU with 500 MB RAM, 5 GB…

Full profile Alternatives Pricing ↗

Also consider:

Neon Free active Turso Free active Upstash Free active

No longer a free-tier pick: CockroachDB — free tier removed.

When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 500 MB database storage, need more than 50K MAU for auth, or project pauses become disruptive (Supabase pauses inactive projects after 1 week).
Full comparison guide →

🔐 Authentication

Recommended Clerk Hobby active

50K monthly retained users free — the most generous auth free tier. Drop-in components for React/Next.js with social login, MFA, and user management.

Drop-in auth with 50K monthly retained users free, unlimited apps

Full profile Alternatives Pricing ↗

Also consider:

Auth0 Free active Firebase Spark active
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 50K retained users (Clerk) or 25K MAU (Auth0). At this scale you likely have revenue to cover auth costs.
Full comparison guide →

📧 Email & Transactional

Recommended Resend Free active

3K emails/month free with a modern, developer-first API. Clean SDK, React Email templates, and excellent deliverability.

Developer-first email API — 3K emails/month free (100/day cap), 3 domains, 1K marketing contacts/month, 5 AI credits, 30-day data retention

Full profile Alternatives Pricing ↗
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 3K emails/month. For high-volume transactional email, consider Amazon SES at scale — no free tier, but $0.10/1,000.
Full comparison guide →

📊 Monitoring & Observability

Recommended New Relic Free active

100 GB data ingest/month free — by far the most generous monitoring free tier. Full-stack observability: APM, logs, infrastructure, browser, and synthetic checks.

Full observability platform — 100 GB data ingest/month, 1 full platform user, unlimited basic users, 500 synthetic checks, 8+ days retention

Full profile Alternatives Pricing ↗

Also consider:

Grafana Cloud Free active BetterStack Free active Sentry Developer active
When you'll outgrow it: At 100 GB/month you can monitor a substantial production app. You'll likely outgrow the 1 full-platform user limit before the data limit.
Full comparison guide →

🔄 CI/CD

Recommended GitHub Actions Free active

2K minutes/month for private repos, unlimited for open source. Deep GitHub integration, massive marketplace of community actions, and matrix builds.

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…

Full profile Alternatives Pricing ↗

Also consider:

GitLab CI Free active
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 2K minutes/month on private repos. Self-hosted runners are free.
Full comparison guide →

💾 Object Storage

Recommended Cloudflare R2 Free active

10 GB storage with zero egress fees — the only major provider that doesn't charge for bandwidth. S3-compatible API.

Object storage with zero egress fees — 10 GB storage, 1M writes, 10M reads/month free

Full profile Alternatives Pricing ↗

Also consider:

Backblaze B2 Free Allowance active
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 10 GB storage or 1M write operations/month. R2's zero-egress model means bandwidth isn't the constraint — it's storage volume.
Full comparison guide →

🐛 Error Tracking

Recommended Sentry Developer active

5K errors/month, 5M spans, 50 session replays. Best-in-class stack traces, release tracking, and performance monitoring. All major frameworks supported.

Developer tier: 1 user, 5K errors/month, 5M spans/month, 50 session replays, 5GB application logs, 1GB attachments

Full profile Alternatives Pricing ↗

Also consider:

Bugsnag Free active Rollbar Free active
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 5K errors/month. At that point, you either need a paid plan or need to fix your bugs.
Full comparison guide →

📈 Analytics

Recommended PostHog Free unrated — change refused

1M events/month, 5K session replays, feature flags, and A/B testing — all free. The most comprehensive free analytics platform for product teams.

Product analytics — 1M events/month, 5K session replays, 1M feature flag requests, 100K error events, A/B testing. No credit card required

Full profile Alternatives Pricing ↗

Also consider:

Umami Free OSS unrated — page states no price
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 1M events/month. PostHog's generous free tier covers most startups through their first 10K users.
Full comparison guide →

Stability Notes

Recent pricing changes affecting vendors in this stack. Based on our tracking of 476 deal changes across 1,574+ developer tools.

pricing restructured Netlify: Restructured to credit-based pricing; sites pause on credit exhaustion Source ↗
restriction Netlify: No longer in force (2026-04-14). Every repo committer is now charged as a full Pro seat ($19/mo) when using Netlify CMS or Identity with ... Source ↗
limits reduced Supabase: Project pause policy tightened — inactive projects now pause after 1 week Source ↗
pricing postponed GitHub Actions: Self-hosted runner per-minute fee ($0.002/min) announced for March 2026 was postponed indefinitely after community backlash. Self-hosted ... Source ↗
pricing restructured Sentry: Switched from performance units to spans-based metrics for error and performance monitoring Source ↗
pricing restructured Neon: Neon moved its paid Launch and Scale plans to usage-based pricing with a $5 monthly minimum. The Free plan went from 0.5 GB of storage an... Source ↗
limits increased Neon: Neon doubled the Free plan's compute from 50 to 100 CU-hours per project a month. Source ↗
limits increased Neon: Neon made Neon Auth available on all plans, including Free. Source ↗
limits increased Neon: 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 increased Neon: Neon's Free plan went from one member per organization to unlimited members. Source ↗
pricing restructured Vercel: Pro plan moved to credit-based model ($20/mo credit pool), Hobby plan metrics renamed and restructured — bandwidth→Fast Data Transfer, se... Source ↗
limits reduced Firebase: Cloud Storage for Firebase now requires the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan, in effect from February 3, 2026. Projects on the no-cost Spark plan... Source ↗

View all 476 pricing changes →

When You'll Outgrow Free Tiers

Most startups can run on free tiers through their first 1,000-5,000 users. Here's what typically hits limits first:

  1. Database storage (Supabase 500 MB) — usually the first constraint for data-heavy apps
  2. Email volume (Resend 3K/month) — grows linearly with user signups and transactional triggers
  3. Analytics events (PostHog 1M/month) — high-traffic apps with event-heavy tracking
  4. CI/CD minutes (GitHub Actions 2K/month) — large test suites on private repos
  5. Hosting compute (Vercel 4 hrs CPU/month) — CPU-intensive APIs or SSR-heavy sites

The good news: by the time you hit these limits, you should have enough users (and hopefully revenue) to justify paid plans. The jump from free to first paid tier is typically $5-25/month per service.

Need a specialized stack? Try our AI Agent Builder's Stack for agent-specific infrastructure, or search our full index of 1,574+ developer deals.

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