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 | — | 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 |