The Solo Founder's Stack: Tools and Services Under £100/month

The "ramen-profitable micro SaaS" story used to require a maths PhD to make the unit economics work. In 2026 it doesn't. Modern free tiers and generous startup credits mean you can run a full SaaS infrastructure for under £100/month until you have hundreds of paying customers. Here's exactly what we'd use.

Hosting and backend — £0–£25/month

• Vercel — free for personal projects, £20/month Pro when you need it. Hosts the Next.js / React app.
• Neon Postgres — free tier is generous (3GB storage, 100 hours of compute). £15/month when you outgrow it.
• Cloudflare R2 — object storage at zero egress cost. £0 for the first 10GB stored.

Auth, payments, emails — £0–£40/month

• Clerk — auth (signup, OAuth, MFA, password reset). Free up to 10,000 users.
• Stripe — payments. No monthly fee. Standard transaction fees only.
• Resend — transactional email (signup confirmations, password resets, billing notifications). 3,000 emails/month free, £18/month for 50,000.

AI, observability, ops — £20–£50/month at MVP scale

• OpenAI / Anthropic — typical MVP AI cost is £5–£30/month. Cap your spend in the console.
• Sentry — error tracking. Free tier is enough for first 50 customers; £20/month after.
• Axiom — structured logs. Free tier handles MVP. £25/month when you need real volume.
• Plausible / Fathom — privacy-friendly analytics, no cookie banner required. £9/month.

Support, comms, marketing — £0–£20/month

• Crisp / Customerly — customer support chat. Free tiers good enough for first 50 customers.
• Plausible Newsletter or Buttondown — newsletter / email marketing. Free under 100 subscribers, £9/month after.
• Tally / Typeform — survey and feedback forms. Free tier handles small volume.

Domain, branding, legal — one-off costs

• Domain — £10/year (Cloudflare Registrar) to £40/year (Namecheap).
• Logo — Figma free, or £150 from a Fiverr designer for something professional.
• Privacy policy + terms — Termly is £8/month, or pay a one-off £100–£200 for a templated set from a UK legal automation service.

Total monthly cost: £30–£100

A typical MVP runs £30–£60/month total in the first six months, climbing to £80–£150 as you cross 100 paying customers. The first $1M of ARR is achievable on this stack with minor incremental cost — most of the stack scales linearly with revenue.

What we'd not pay for at MVP stage

• Paid analytics dashboards beyond Plausible. Build what you need in your own product instead.
• Marketing automation platforms (ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit) until you have an audience to nurture. A spreadsheet works for the first 100 customers.
• CRM tools (HubSpot, Salesforce). A Notion database is fine for tracking your first 50 prospects.
• Heavyweight CI/CD beyond what Vercel gives you for free.

See the micro SaaS pillar for the broader engineering and product approach.

Sree Jagatab is an AI automation engineer based in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. He builds custom Python and AI automation for UK SMEs across Cambridge, Peterborough, and the surrounding region. More about Sree →