When I started building the infrastructure behind my templates, my only real goal was to find the cheapest possible way to host something. I wasn't trying to build the ultimate cost-optimized stack. I just didn't want to pay $50/month for a side project that might not go anywhere. What I ended up with is a stack that costs me roughly $7-8/month all-in, and most of the individual pieces are free.
Here's what I'm actually using, and why.
Compute: Hetzner (almost), then Contabo
I originally planned to host on Hetzner's Cost-Optimized CX line, cheap ARM instances that are usually the go-to recommendation for budget VPS hosting. Except when I went to actually spin one up, the entire line was out of stock across every EU location. Their next tier up, the Regular Performance CPX line, had just gone through a 2026 price hike and was going to run me about $23/month for the smallest instance that could actually handle what I needed.
That felt like too much for a project still in "let's see if this works" mode, so I looked elsewhere and landed on Contabo: $5-7/month for 3-4 vCPUs and 8GB of RAM, which is a lot more headroom for a lot less money. It's not as polished as Hetzner, but for a solo project, the extra $15-18/month saved matters more than the extra polish.
Lesson: the "obvious" cheap host isn't always available or actually cheap by the time you need it. Have a backup in mind before you're mid-setup.
Database: self-hosted Postgres instead of a managed service
My first instinct was to use a managed Postgres provider, Neon specifically, since it has a generous free tier. But once I had the app and the database living in different regions, I was paying for that in latency, and the free tier ceiling was going to force a decision eventually anyway.
Instead, I just run Postgres in a Docker container on the same box as the app. Same server, no network hop, no extra bill. The tradeoff is real (I now own backups and upgrades myself), but for the traffic I'm dealing with right now, that's a fine trade.
Error tracking: Sentry's free tier
Sentry's free tier covers error tracking for a project at this scale without paying anything. I haven't needed to think about this one much, which is exactly what you want from a monitoring tool at this stage.
Analytics: PostHog, in cookieless mode
PostHog has a free tier that covers page views and event tracking, which is what I use for CTA clicks and basic funnel visibility. I run it in cookieless mode specifically to avoid needing an EU consent banner. The tradeoff is I lose cross-day and return-visit tracking (I can't tell if someone came back three days later), but at my current traffic, that's a diagnostic I don't need yet. If sales volume grows to the point where I need deeper funnel analysis, I'll revisit it. Until then, it's not worth the UX cost of a cookie banner.
This is where a lot of solo devs overspend early. Tools like Datadog or Mixpanel are excellent, but they're built for teams that need deep, real-time observability across complex systems. At the scale of "one person, one server, a few hundred visitors a day," you don't need that yet, and paying for it before you need it is money that could go toward literally anything else.
Email: Resend
Resend handles both transactional email (verification links, etc.) and newsletter sends via Audiences. The free tier is generous enough that I haven't hit a wall with it.
CI/CD: GitHub Actions
This one almost didn't make the list because it felt too obvious to mention: most people are probably already using GitHub Actions for CI. But "obvious" and "free" aren't mutually exclusive, and it's worth stating plainly: I'm not paying for CI at all. GitHub Actions' free tier covers everything I need for running tests and deployments on a project this size.
The running total
- Compute (Contabo): ~$6/month
- Database: $0 (self-hosted on the same box)
- Error tracking (Sentry): $0
- Analytics (PostHog): $0
- Email (Resend): $0
- CI/CD (GitHub Actions): $0
- Domain: a few dollars a month amortized
All told, I'm running this for somewhere around $7-8/month, and almost all of that is the server itself. Every other piece of the stack is a free tier that hasn't needed to become a paid tier yet.
The actual point
The point isn't "use these exact tools." It's that as a solo dev, your default should be to find the free tier first and only pay when you've actually outgrown it, not when you assume you will. I got here mostly by accident, because Hetzner ran out of servers and I had to make a decision fast. But it forced me to actually evaluate what I needed versus what I assumed I needed, and most of what I assumed I needed turned out to be free.
Where this shows up in the templates
These aren't just my personal choices in isolation. They're the same defaults baked into the templates themselves. The Rails and Go templates ship ready to talk to Sentry, PostHog, and Resend out of the box, and the deployment setup assumes a cheap VPS rather than a pricier managed platform. If you're starting a new SaaS project and don't want to spend a weekend wiring up error tracking and analytics from scratch, that's exactly the gap the templates fill. That said, everything is swappable. The templates aren't locked into these specific tools, just set up to make this particular cheap stack easy to start with.
What are you using?
I'd genuinely like to know what other solo devs are running for a cheap stack. If you're using something different for compute, error tracking, analytics, or email, especially if it's a tool I haven't mentioned here, I'd like to hear about it. If there's a common alternative enough people are using, it's worth me looking into supporting it more directly in the templates.