Build AI products on free tiers. Neon, Railway, Supabase Auth, Grafana Cloud, Postmark, CircleCI — verified limits, cost at scale, stability ratings.
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… | active | $0 | $19 | $69 | $350 |
| Hosting | RailwayFree $0 per month. Start with a 30-day free trial with $5 credits, then $1 per month. Up… read 2026-09-03 | at risk | $0 | $5 | $20 | $100 |
| Auth | Supabase AuthThe free tier includes unlimited API requests, 50,000 monthly active users, 500 MB… read 2026-09-03 | at risk | $0 | $0 | $0 | $25 |
| Monitoring | Grafana CloudFree tier includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day… read 2026-09-02 | at risk | $0 | $0 | $29 | $299 |
| PostmarkTransactional email API — 100 emails/month free, never expires, no credit card required | active | $0 | $15 | $50 | $215 | |
| CI/CD | CircleCI30K credits/month (up to 6,000 build minutes on small Docker), 5 users, 30x concurrency… | active | $0 | $0 | $15 | $25 |
| Total | $0/mo | $39/mo | $183/mo | $1,014/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, 0.5 GB storage per project, up to 100 projects, 10 branches…
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… read 2026-09-03
50K MAU free with social login and JWT tokens. Lightweight and API-first.
The free tier includes unlimited API requests, 50,000 monthly active users, 500 MB database size, 5 GB egress, 1 GB file storage. Free projects are… read 2026-09-03
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… read 2026-09-02
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.
30K credits/month (up to 6,000 build minutes on small Docker), 5 users, 30x concurrency, no credit card required
Want to customize this stack? Here are smart swaps that can save money at scale:
Save $125/mo at 100K users — Resend has a larger free tier (3K vs 100 emails/mo)
Get 100 GB free ingest — better for startups that need APM + logs in one place
Use plan_stack to get AI-powered stack recommendations tailored to your specific use case.
claude mcp add agentdeals -- npx -y agentdealsWorks with Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Windsurf → Full setup guide