"How much does it cost to run?" is the question every indie hacker asks before shipping — and the one almost no blog post answers honestly. Most "tools I use" lists ignore the AWS bill, the per-1000-email pricing, the Stripe Atlas $500, and the fact that generative AI features now eat budgets that used to be 100% infrastructure.
This guide is the line-item breakdown of what a real SaaS side project actually costs in 2026, from the $0/month "ship it on free tiers" version to the $200/month "I have customers and uptime matters now" version. Numbers verified against current public pricing as of April 2026.
The 12 line items (in order of how much they'll surprise you)
Every side project pays for some subset of these. Skip any that don't apply.
| # |
Line item |
Free tier good? |
Typical paid range |
| 1 |
Domain |
❌ (you'll want one) |
$10–15/year ($1–2/mo) |
| 2 |
Hosting (frontend + serverless) |
✅ Excellent |
$0–25/mo |
| 3 |
Database |
✅ Good |
$0–50/mo |
| 4 |
Authentication |
✅ Generous |
$0–25/mo |
| 5 |
File storage / CDN |
✅ Good |
$0–10/mo |
| 6 |
Transactional email |
⚠ Tiny limits |
$1–20/mo |
| 7 |
Analytics |
✅ Excellent |
$0–20/mo |
| 8 |
Error tracking |
✅ Decent |
$0–26/mo |
| 9 |
Payment processing |
N/A (usage-based) |
2.9% + 30¢ per txn |
| 10 |
AI API (LLM, embeddings, etc.) |
⚠ Small credits |
$5–unlimited |
| 11 |
Background jobs / queue |
✅ Decent |
$0–20/mo |
| 12 |
Productivity SaaS (1Password, Linear, etc.) |
⚠ Often 1-seat free |
$0–30/mo |
Now let's price each one honestly.
1. Domain — $1–2/month
The cheapest line item and the one you should never compromise on. A .com from a sane registrar is $10–13/year. A .io is $35–60/year. A .dev or .app is $12–20/year.
Recommended registrars in 2026: Cloudflare Registrar (at-cost pricing, no markup), Porkbun (cheap, no upsell carnival), Namecheap (fine but pushes upsells). Avoid: GoDaddy, Network Solutions — both still play hidden-fee games in 2026.
2. Hosting — $0–$25/month
This is the line item where free tiers are genuinely production-ready in 2026.
- Cloudflare Pages — unlimited bandwidth, 500 deploys/month, 100k requests/day. Free tier is enough for most side projects forever.
- Vercel — 100GB bandwidth/month free, then $20/mo for Pro (1TB) plus per-overage charges that can spike if your project goes viral. Best DX of the three.
- Netlify — 100GB bandwidth free, $19/mo for Pro. Good middle ground.
- Self-hosted (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, OVH) — $4–6/month gets you a small VPS. More work, more control, no per-request pricing surprises.
The catch: Vercel + a viral HackerNews post can cost you four-figure overage bills before you notice. If you're scared of that, Cloudflare Pages or self-hosted is the safer floor.
3. Database — $0–$50/month
- Supabase — generous free tier (500MB DB, 50k monthly active users, 1GB storage), then $25/mo for the Pro plan with much higher limits. Postgres under the hood, great DX.
- Neon — serverless Postgres, free tier good for hobby projects, scale-to-zero. $19/mo for Launch tier.
- PlanetScale — MySQL, free tier killed in 2024 (replaced with $39/mo entry plan). Best if you've outgrown Supabase.
- SQLite + Litestream / Turso — close to free, run from your VPS, replicates to S3 or Cloudflare R2. Great for read-heavy apps.
For nearly every side project, Supabase free tier or Neon free tier is the right answer. Don't overpay for a database before you have users.
4. Authentication — $0–$25/month
- Supabase Auth — included with your Supabase project. 50k MAUs free.
- Clerk — generous free tier (10k MAUs), $25/mo Pro after. Best DX.
- Auth0 — free up to 25k MAUs, then expensive fast.
- Roll your own — possible but painful. Don't, unless you have a specific reason.
If you're using Supabase for the DB, just use Supabase Auth. One vendor, one bill, one less integration to debug.
5. File storage / CDN — $0–$10/month
- Cloudflare R2 — S3-compatible, zero egress fees (the killer feature vs S3), 10GB free, then ~$0.015/GB stored.
- Supabase Storage — included with Supabase, 1GB free, simple.
- AWS S3 — battle-tested but the egress fees ($0.09/GB out) will bite you the moment you serve files at any scale.
For nearly every side project in 2026, R2 is the right answer. The S3 egress trap is real.
6. Transactional email — $1–$20/month (the sneaky line item)
This is where most builders get caught by surprise. "Free tier" email providers usually mean 100–3,000 emails/month, which sounds like a lot until your app sends signup confirmations + password resets + receipts.
- Resend — 3,000 emails/month free, then $20/mo for 50k. Best DX in 2026.
- Postmark — 100 emails/month free (yes, 100), $15/mo for 10k. Best deliverability.
- SendGrid (Twilio) — 100/day free, $20/mo for 50k. Older but reliable.
- Loops — for marketing emails, generous free tier (1k contacts), $49/mo Pro.
If you only need transactional (signups, receipts, password resets): start with Resend free, upgrade when you cross 3k/month. If you also need marketing: Loops or a separate ESP.
7. Analytics — $0–$20/month
- Cloudflare Web Analytics — free, no cookie banner needed, no tracking scripts to ship. Good enough for most.
- Plausible / Umami / Pirsch — privacy-friendly, $9–14/mo, simple. Self-host Umami for $0 if you have a VPS.
- PostHog — generous free tier (1M events/month), $0 self-hosted. Way more powerful (session replay, feature flags, A/B tests) but heavier.
- Google Analytics 4 — free, but ad-tier complexity and you become Google's product. Skip.
Default: Cloudflare Web Analytics for traffic, PostHog free if you want product analytics.
8. Error tracking — $0–$26/month
- Sentry — 5k errors/month free, $26/mo for the entry paid tier. The default for a reason.
- PostHog — error tracking is included if you're already using it, so net zero.
- Self-hosted Sentry / GlitchTip — possible but you're now babysitting another service. Probably not worth it for a side project.
For most side projects: Sentry free tier is plenty until you have real traffic.
9. Payment processing — usage-based
If you're charging users, you're paying ~2.9% + 30¢ per transaction. We covered the right platform choice in detail in our payment gateways guide. For a side project: Stripe if you're US-only, Lemon Squeezy if you're shipping globally on day one and don't want to deal with VAT.
10. AI API spend — $5 to unlimited (the new biggest line item)
This is the line item that's changed the entire side-project economics in 2026. A chatty AI feature talking to GPT-5, Claude Opus, or Gemini Ultra can easily outspend your hosting + DB combined.
Real per-1k-token costs, April 2026 (input/output, USD):
- GPT-5: ~$5 / $20
- Claude Opus 4.7: ~$15 / $75
- Claude Sonnet 4.6: ~$3 / $15
- Gemini 2.5 Pro: ~$1.25 / $10
- Llama 3.1 70B (via Groq, Together): ~$0.60 / $0.60
- DeepSeek V3: ~$0.30 / $0.90 — cheapest credible option
A single user having a 20-message conversation with Claude Opus can cost $0.10–0.50. Multiply by 1,000 daily users and you're at $100–500/day. This is the line item that breaks side-project budgets.
Strategies that work:
- Default to the cheap model (Sonnet, Gemini Flash, DeepSeek) and route to Opus/GPT-5 only when needed.
- Cache aggressively — even simple response caching cuts spend 30–50%.
- Set hard per-user daily limits — your free tier is not a charity for token-burning users.
We covered the API choice in detail in our Best AI APIs for developers 2026 guide.
11. Background jobs / queue — $0–$20/month
- Trigger.dev — generous free tier, $20/mo for hobby Pro. Great DX.
- Inngest — similar, free tier, $20/mo.
- Cloudflare Queues + Workers — pay-per-use, scales to zero, very cheap.
- Upstash QStash — 500 messages/day free.
Skip entirely if your app doesn't need background jobs. Most side projects don't, until they do — then any of the above work.
12. Productivity SaaS — $0–$30/month
The hidden category most cost breakdowns ignore: the tools you use to build the side project itself. GitHub Pro, 1Password Family, Linear, Notion, your AI coding assistant. Easy to spend $50–80/month on these even if your actual app costs $5/month to run. Worth tracking honestly.
Three example budgets
The $0/month build
For a working app, no real users yet:
- Domain — Cloudflare or Porkbun ($1/mo amortised)
- Hosting — Cloudflare Pages (free)
- Database — Supabase free tier
- Auth — Supabase Auth (free)
- Storage — Supabase Storage (free)
- Email — Resend (free)
- Analytics — Cloudflare Web Analytics (free)
- Errors — Sentry (free)
- AI — DeepSeek free credits or local Llama via Ollama
Real cost: ~$1/mo (domain only). Genuinely. This is the floor in 2026.
The $25–40/month "I have users" build
For an app with 100–10,000 monthly active users:
- Domain — $1/mo
- Hosting — Vercel Pro ($20/mo) or Cloudflare Pages (free)
- Database — Supabase Pro ($25/mo) or Neon Launch ($19/mo)
- Email — Resend (free until 3k/mo)
- Analytics — Cloudflare or PostHog (free)
- Errors — Sentry (free until 5k errors)
- AI — $5–10/mo at light usage with Sonnet/Gemini Flash
Real cost: $26–46/mo. This is the realistic floor for a project you actually care about.
The $200/month "real business" build
For an app with 10k+ MAUs, paying customers, uptime that matters:
- Domain — $1/mo
- Hosting — Vercel Pro ($20/mo) + likely $20–40/mo overage
- Database — Supabase Pro ($25) or scale tier ($25–100)
- Email — Resend ($20/mo for 50k)
- Marketing email — Loops ($49/mo)
- Analytics — PostHog Scale ($0–20/mo at modest event volume)
- Errors — Sentry Team ($26/mo)
- AI — $30–80/mo with caching + smart routing
- Background jobs — Trigger.dev ($20/mo)
- Productivity — GitHub Pro + 1Password + Linear (~$30/mo)
Real cost: $200–300/mo. This buys you uptime, support, and the ability to focus on the product instead of debugging infrastructure.
What's NOT worth your money
- AWS for side projects. Free tier is a maze of "$0.000017 per GB-second" pricing and it'll bill you for things you don't realise are running. Cloudflare or Vercel for the next 5 years until you have a Real Engineering Team.
- Heroku. Pricing went up, free tier died. Use Railway or Render if you want the Heroku-like DX.
- Datadog or New Relic for a side project. The bill goes from $0 to $400/mo in one quarter. Sentry + Cloudflare logs are enough.
- Premium DNS providers. Cloudflare DNS is free and faster than 99% of paid options.
- A "real" CDN beyond what your hosting includes. Cloudflare or Vercel's edge is fine.
Common mistakes
- Ignoring AI API spend until the bill arrives. Set hard limits per user per day from day one.
- Forgetting about egress fees. Serving images from S3 at scale costs more than the rest of your stack combined. Use R2.
- Paying for productivity SaaS before paying for production infrastructure. Linear is nice; uptime is nicer.
- Free-tier vendor sprawl. Six free-tier services means six dashboards, six logins, six places where the data lives. Worth consolidating to fewer vendors at scale.
- Not tracking spend at all. Open AWS / Stripe / OpenAI billing dashboards weekly while you're scaling. The first sign of a bad bill is rarely the bill itself.
FAQ
Can I really run a side project for $0/month?
Yes, until you need real email sending, real AI usage, or real traffic past the free-tier limits. Most pre-launch and early-launch projects fit comfortably.
What's the cheapest "real" stack?
Cloudflare Pages + Supabase Pro + Resend + DeepSeek API + a $12/year domain. Total: ~$26/mo for a real, scalable, uptime-respecting setup.
Where does AWS fit?
Production-grade systems past $1k MRR or with specific compliance needs. For a $0–$200/mo side project budget: skip AWS, use Cloudflare/Vercel/Supabase.
Should I self-host on a $5 VPS instead?
If you enjoy the ops work, absolutely — Hetzner CX22 ($4.50/mo) + Coolify or Dokku gives you Heroku-on-your-own-server. But factor in your own time. A weekend of debugging beats a $20/mo bill if you'd rather ship features.
What about Cloudflare Workers + Workers KV / D1 / R2?
Genuinely great for the right shape of app — edge-first, simple data model, low write volume. The pricing is the lowest in this list at scale. Worth a serious look for new projects.
Does AI replace engineers cheaply enough that I shouldn't worry about API spend?
For dev-tooling: yes (Claude/Cursor pays for itself in hours saved). For end-user features: depends entirely on your unit economics. A free-tier user generating 50¢/day in AI cost is unsustainable; a $20/mo paid user generating 50¢/day in AI cost is great margin.
The verdict
Side projects are cheaper than ever to run in 2026 — the $0–$5 floor is real and viable. They're also more capable than ever, with AI features that can spike costs into four figures if you're not careful. The right approach: ship on free tiers, instrument spend from day one, and only upgrade line items when you see actual numbers telling you to.
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