What a lean SaaS stack costs per month: two worked examples with published prices

Founders often underestimate the total cost of the subscriptions a small software product depends on, or overestimate it and over-engineer to avoid them. This page adds up a typical lean stack at two stages, using only prices published on each vendor's pricing page. Every line links to our detailed comparison, which explains the alternatives and the catches.

*Prices checked on 18 October 2026. US-based vendors are shown in US dollars and UK vendors in pounds sterling, excluding VAT. No currency conversion is applied, so the two totals are shown separately. Your stack will differ, so treat this as a template, not a recommendation.*

Stage 1: building and pre-launch

A solo founder or two-person team, a marketing site, a web app in development and the first test users.

Stage 1 total: $0 in US-dollar subscriptions, plus the domain, plus £0–£33 for accounting.

It is genuinely possible to build and launch on free plans. The catches to plan for are:

• Supabase's free projects pause when inactive, which is fine during development but not for a live product with sporadic traffic.
• Resend's 100-a-day limit can be reached by a launch-day spike in sign-ups.
• Free plans generally come with community support only.

Stage 2: early revenue

The product is live, with a few hundred paying customers on a £20 monthly plan, three people working on it, and a few thousand people on the mailing list.

Stage 2 subscriptions: $89 a month in US-dollar tools ($5 + $25 + $20 + $9 + $30), plus £33–£39 for accounting (or £0 with an eligible FreeAgent bank account).

Payment fees depend on revenue. For example, with 300 customers paying £20 a month by standard UK card, Stripe's fees would be 300 × 74p = £222 a month. That is more than all the subscriptions put together. If you used a merchant of record instead, at 5% + 50¢ per payment, the fees would be higher, but the provider would handle international sales tax for you. Our payments comparison works through the trade-off.

Where costs tend to grow first

Published pricing shows which lines grow fastest as a product grows:

• Payment fees grow directly with revenue. They are usually the largest cost once you have customers.
• Per-seat tools (Linear, Vercel Pro, many others) grow with headcount rather than usage.
• Usage-based services (Supabase beyond its quotas, PostHog, Netlify credits, Neon compute) grow with traffic and need spend limits.
• Auth priced per user can grow sharply. For example, at 80,000 retained users, Clerk Pro would cost about $625 a month on its published rates, compared with $25 on Supabase Pro. See Clerk vs Auth0 vs Supabase Auth.

Ways to keep the bill lean

1. Set spend limits and alerts everywhere they are offered: Supabase's spend cap, PostHog's billing limits, Vercel's on-demand budget and your cloud provider's budget alerts.
2. Review seats every quarter. Remove people who have left, and check whether every tool still needs a paid seat for everyone.
3. Prefer annual billing only for tools you are sure about. Linear's quoted prices are for yearly billing. Kit and Plausible offer discounts for paying yearly.
4. Watch introductory offers. Xero's 90%-off and FreeAgent's 50%-off periods end, so budget for the regular price.
5. Keep exports. Being able to leave a tool, with database dumps, subscriber lists and accounting exports, is what keeps prices competitive for you.

Sources

• Cloudflare Pages and Workers pricing
• Supabase pricing
• Resend pricing
• PostHog pricing
• Plausible pricing
• Linear pricing
• Kit pricing
• Stripe UK pricing
• Xero UK pricing
• FreeAgent pricing

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