Build AI products on free tiers. Neon, Railway, Supabase Auth, Grafana Cloud, Postmark, CircleCI — published limits, cost at scale, stability ratings.
Published 2026-04-04 · Not yet reviewed
Infrastructure for AI startups that need fast iteration and reliable observability.
AI startups burn through compute budgets fast — save infrastructure costs by using free tiers for everything except your model API. This stack pairs a serverless Postgres database (great for embeddings and vector search via pgvector) with Railway for flexible container hosting and Grafana Cloud for the observability you need when debugging model behavior.
| Category | Service | Stability | Free | ~1K MAU | ~10K MAU | ~100K MAU |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Database | NeonServerless Postgres with branching — free tier includes 100 CU-hours/month per project, 1… | active | $0 | $0 | $19 | $162 |
| Hosting | RailwayFree $0 per month. Start with a 30-day free trial with $5 credits, then $1 per month. Up… | active | $0 | $5 | $20 | $100 |
| Auth | Supabase AuthPostgres development platform: database, Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Functions. The… | active | $0 | $0 | $0 | $25 |
| Monitoring | Grafana CloudFree tier includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day… | active | $0 | $0 | $29 | $299 |
| PostmarkTransactional email API — 100 emails/month free, never expires, no credit card required | active | $0 | $15 | $50 | $215 | |
| CI/CD | CircleCIThe Free plan includes 30,000 credits/month, 5 active users, and options for different… | active | $0 | $0 | $15 | $25 |
| Total | $0/mo | $20/mo | $133/mo | $826/mo |
Serverless Postgres with pgvector for embeddings. Branching for A/B testing different schemas.
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…
Container-native hosting that handles GPU-adjacent workloads. No cold starts, great for API servers.
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…
50K MAU free with social login and JWT tokens. Lightweight and API-first.
Postgres development platform: database, Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Functions. The Free plan is $0: unlimited API requests, 50,000 monthly…
Generous free logs (50 GB) — critical for debugging AI pipelines and model behavior.
Free tier includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day retention, and community support. 10k metric series, 50 GB logs…
Best deliverability for transactional email. Your AI product notifications always land.
Transactional email API — 100 emails/month free, never expires, no credit card required
30K free credits cover heavy test suites. Docker layer caching speeds up ML pipeline builds.
The Free plan includes 30,000 credits/month, 5 active users, and options for different resource classes (Docker, Windows, Linux, Arm, macOS) with…
Want to customize this stack? Here are smart swaps that can save money at scale: