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.
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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 | PlanetScale Paid | 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 | — | 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 |