Stage 2 of 5 · up to ~$50/mo
The indie stack
A solo developer’s paid product. Cheap, low-maintenance and fine for real customers.
§1
One pick per job
editorial, never paid| Job | Our pick | Why | From | Also consider |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VPS | Hetzner Cloud Paid | 2 vCPU and 4 GB from €5.49/mo with 20 TB of EU traffic included; the cheapest plans often sell out. | €5.49/mo | BuyVM KVM Slices , Webdock VPS , Vultr Cloud Compute |
| PaaS | Render Free tier | Deploys any Docker image from Git; paid services never sleep and Postgres sits in the same region. | $7/mo | Northflank , Dokploy , Cloudflare Workers (incl. Pages) |
| Databases | Supabase Free tier | Postgres plus auth, storage and APIs in one project; Pro from $25/mo. | $25/mo | Aiven , Cloudflare D1 , Redis Cloud |
| Transactional email | Postmark Free tier | A transactional-only service from $15/mo for 10,000 emails, with inbound on Pro and Platform. | $15/mo | MailerSend , Brevo , Mailjet |
| Email marketing | MailerLite Free tier | A free plan to start, then automations and landing pages at modest per-subscriber prices. | $12/mo | Sender , Brevo , EmailOctopus |
| Registrars | Cloudflare Registrar Paid | At-cost .com renewals with free DNSSEC; the domain must use Cloudflare DNS. | $10.46/yr | Openprovider , Hostinger Domains , Amazon Route 53 |
| CDN and DNS | Bunny CDN Paid | $0.01/GB in Europe and North America, free DNS for up to 500 zones, $1/mo minimum. | Usage-based | deSEC , Hetzner DNS , Hurricane Electric Free DNS |
| Monitoring | Sentry Free tier | Error tracking, tracing and replays; the free Developer plan covers 5k errors a month. | $26/mo | New Relic , UptimeRobot , GlitchTip |
| Auth | Logto Free tier | 50,000 MAU on the free cloud plan, and open source if you want to self-host later. | $24/mo | Nile , Asgardeo , Better Auth |