Stage 3 of 5 · up to ~$500/mo

The startup stack

A small team in production. Reliability, team seats and room to grow without re-platforming.

§1

One pick per job

editorial, never paid
Job Our pick Why From Also consider
VPS 13 regions and per-second billing, with managed databases, Kubernetes and App Platform next door. $4/mo Google Compute Engine , Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute , Webdock VPS
PaaS
Railway Free tier
Usage-based from $5/mo, with Postgres, MySQL and Redis templates next to your services. $5/mo Northflank , Dokploy , Cloudflare Workers (incl. Pages)
Databases
Postgres or MySQL from $5/mo, with branches that each run on their own cluster. $5/mo Aiven , Cloudflare D1 , Redis Cloud
Transactional email $19.95/mo covers 50,000 emails; a dedicated IP is included from the Pro plan. $19.95/mo MailerSend , Brevo , Mailjet
Email marketing
Loops Free tier
Event-triggered workflows on every plan, with marketing and transactional email in one place. $49/mo Sender , Brevo , EmailOctopus
Registrars No pick yet — Openprovider , Amazon Route 53 , DNSimple
CDN and DNS
Amazon CloudFront Free tier
Flat-rate plans that include WAF rules and Route 53 DNS, on 750+ PoPs. $15/mo deSEC , Hetzner DNS , jsDelivr
Monitoring
Better Stack Free tier
Uptime, on-call, status pages and logs in one; the free tier has 10 monitors and 3 GB of logs. $29/mo Coroot , New Relic , UptimeRobot
Auth
WorkOS AuthKit Free tier
Free up to 1 million MAU; enterprise SSO is $125/mo per connection when you sell to companies. $125/mo Nile , Asgardeo , Better Auth

"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.