Stage 4 of 5 · usage-driven

The scale-up stack

A growing company. Scale, support, SLAs and pricing that stays sane at volume.

§1

One pick per job

editorial, never paid
Job Our pick Why From Also consider
VPS 26 regions, pooled transfer and $0.005/GB overage in most regions. $5/mo Google Compute Engine , Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute , Vultr Cloud Compute
PaaS
Google Cloud Run Free tier
Any container in 40+ regions, scales to zero, with a monthly free allowance per billing account. Usage-based Northflank , Cloudflare Workers (incl. Pages) , DigitalOcean App Platform
Databases
Aiven Free tier
Postgres, MySQL, Valkey, Kafka and more on the cloud of your choice, with forks and point-in-time recovery. $5/mo Redis Cloud , Turso , Render
Transactional email
Amazon SES Paid
About $5 for 50,000 emails at à la carte rates, with dedicated IPs from $24.95/mo. Usage-based MailerSend , Brevo , Mailjet
Email marketing
Customer.io Trial
Visual workflows on every plan and 1M emails a month included on Essentials. $100/mo Brevo , Mailjet , Mailchimp
Registrars No pick yet — Openprovider , Amazon Route 53 , DNSimple
CDN and DNS
Fastly Free tier
100 GB a month free, then from $0.12/GB, with edge compute on the same network. Usage-based ClouDNS , Amazon CloudFront , Cloudflare
Monitoring
Grafana Cloud Free tier
OpenTelemetry-native metrics, logs and traces with a free tier that covers every service. $19/mo Coroot , New Relic , Datadog
Auth
Auth0 Free tier
30+ SDKs, B2B organisations and enterprise connections; free up to 25,000 MAU. $35/mo Asgardeo , Better Auth , Logto

"From" is each tool's cheapest paid plan as published; many picks at this stage cost nothing on their free tier. Filter any category by stage for the full list.