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What “low-cost” stack would you recommend for a first-time founder launching a product to save money

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AI is a great, cheap foundation – we can all agree on that (depending on token usage, of course). 😀

When you’re building your first product, and you’re not sure if it will work and earn money, the obvious goal is to keep costs as low as possible and avoid burning money early on.

That’s exactly what I’m trying to do with my upcoming Chrome extension for LinkedIn. I don’t know if it will take off, so I want to go with the most cost-efficient stack possible.

Could you recommend the best low-cost alternatives for infrastructure and launching?

  • Databases

  • Payments/money management (I’m currently considering Stripe)

  • Analytics

  • Hosting and domains?

If there are other essential tools I’m missing, feel free to add them. I’m especially open to dev advice since my experience here is basically zero.

I believe your suggestions could help others in a similar situation, too. And if you know any good promo codes, don’t hesitate to share them. 😄

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Databases: Supabase
Payments: Dodo payments

Analytics: Google Analytics

Hosting: GoDaddy (Would like to see some alternatives here)

I am also kinda launching my first product soon. I have been looking at low-cost tools ever since I started building.

 was looking at Dodo payments, how's it better than Stripe?

 Why do you consider dodo payments better option than Stripe?

 I am fairly new to integrating payments in products. Have been part of Razorpay and Stripe in my previous organizations. Currently, I am part of a 30+ builder community where everyone is using Dodo payments instead of Stripe or Razorpay.

I asked them why. Here's the reason they gave:

"Mainly because Dodo's a Merchant of Recor, they become the legal seller, so they handle VAT/GST/sales tax filing. Stripe's just a payment processor, so you're still on the hook for tax compliance in every market you sell into. You pay more (~6-7% vs Stripe's ~3%), but at pre-revenue stage I'd rather lose a few points of margin than become a part-time tax accountant. Worth it once you're selling internationally; less so if you're US-only from day one."

I'd say for solopreneurs, dodo would be good. So, I am also integrating dodo in my product.


What do you think about this?

 

   I would need more POV into this, so I can choose correctly from the day one!

 Of course, it makes sense. I am gonna learn on the go and see which suits me better.

btw, I attended an event recently and got some free credits for Dodo Payments, so I am starting with Dodo Payments for now :P

Db: Neon

Hosting: Vercel/Godaddy

Payments : Stripe

Repo:Github

 Thank you! :) I have a repo for sure, but private :)

I think it's a mix of speed and cost. You don't want to spend a week deploying a simple thing, while also not break the bank..

For anything that just needs to go fast and reasonably cheap, I would host it on Railway.

  • Manages the entire CI/CD stack + gives monitoring and cheap expansion of mem and cpu if needed

  • You stay a little bit more in control than Vercel etc but also pay less as far as I know

  • You can pick any DB, cache or whatever you need there or even create your own templates

Once validated and memory most likely is start getting expensive (depends on the shape of your app of course), I would either expand on railway by just scaling out or save more money but give up time (maintenance etc) and buy a VPS with something like Coolify to mimick your Railway experience

Payments stripe (best docs and support, and community)

Domains doesnt really matter (I use namecheap) but I need to reconsider this and see which one has the best MCP connection to automate things further

 Why do you want to shift back from namecheap?

 

Namecheap doesnt have an official mcp as far as I know and I think they are not really the leading "engineering" centered DNS..

Uhm also I had issues in the past with wildcard subdomains where the TLS wasn;t able to generate certificates due to some Namecheap limitations on wildcards..

I think I will migrate to cloudflare.. they resolve both issues

  • Database + Auth: Supabase - they even have tutorials for setting up Chrome extension auth with Google Sign-In. Firestore is also a good (and easy to set up) option.

  • Payments: Stripe

  • Hosting: Vercel

  • Domain: GoDaddy

  • Analytics: Vercel has built-in analytics. You can also use PostHog, which offers a startups program with free credits

  • Notifications: Knock

  • LLM calls (if needed): Use cheaper models like Gemini for testing/experimentation (switch to higher-quality models for core features)

If this is your first product (or even if it isn’t), I would focus not just on raw cost but on tools that are easy to get started with. For eg, there are cheaper ways to set up a database, but Supabase offers a great balance of simplicity and cost. Same goes for Vercel.

 To be honest, the most (emotionally) exhausting part is to pay for domain, because I do not want to give it up even when the project is failure :D so I overpay it :D

Repo collection: Gitlab Analytics: Google Analytics/Metabase DB: Postgre Payments: Stripe Hosting: Hetzner

 Never heard about Hetzner. Thank you for the tip! :)

CloudFlare. Firestore,

Stripe is easy but not cheesy.

For seo and analytics my today launch (in 6 hours) upgraded SEOKRATES <3 ()

GoDaddy <3

 What should I use instead of Stripe then?

Similar -

Databases: Supabase

Payments: Dodo payments

Analytics: Google Analytics

Hosting: GoDaddy

 Thank you for hints! :)

Hi

Have a look at what DigitalOcean offer and Cloudflare. Been using these platforms for a while.

Database: DO - Use a dev db first for lower costs and scale up.

Payments - Stripe - Depending on your code and platform, it is fairly simple to integrate and to get things started.

Analytics - Cloudflare free account or $20 to upgrade to pro that is fairly good as a starting point. if you need more you can check out services like Piwik. They used to have a community version. Cloudflare will provide basics, but not user specifics, but traffic source, country location, etc. Otherwise Google, Facebook etc. analytics.

Hosting and Domain - GoDaddy / Cloudflare (Domain) and DO for hosting.

The thing I like most of DO is their support - fast and easy to engage. For other providers like AWS, Azure, etc, they are all seperate paid contracts.

 To be honest, I haven't started with backend yet, so I do not have any clue how I will integrate it. I am learning along the way :D

 Understand :). All the best with the project and discovery.

 Thank you so much, Francois! :)

  • Database + Auth: Supabase - they even have tutorials for setting up Chrome extension auth with Google Sign-In. Firestore is also a good (and easy to set up) option.

  • Payments: Dodo Payments

  • Hosting: Vercel

  • Analytics: Vercel has built-in analytics.

  • LLM calls : Use cheaper models like Gemini for testing/experimentation or Groq also has generous limit

 Someone once said that Vercel is quite pain, and I should go rather with other option for building website, like Framer :D

One thing I'd add is: optimize for tools that are easy to replace, not just cheap.

Early on, your biggest cost usually isn't infrastructure. It's your time.

I'd rather pay a little more for a service with great documentation and a smooth developer experience than spend days debugging a cheaper alternative. You can always optimize costs later once you know what your product actually needs.

 So which tools would you consider the best for taht?

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