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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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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?

I work on AWS so most of the stuff i use is from there and more Entreprise level, as i build to scale:

  • Database: DynamoDb - fastest you can get, highly available and cheap

  • Search - Typesense, offers rich search, typo tolerance etc all the good stuff and much cheaper than OpenSearch, and in the Supabase search sucks

  • Supabase Auth - only Auth as it is cheap and good alternative to Cognito (which gets expensive at scale).

  • Payments - Stripe, as the compliance is good, flexibility and integrations

  • Hosting - Route53 as part of the AWS, but outside of AWS i would choose Squarespace Domains. GoDaddy isn't cheap anymore..

  • Keeping code - GitHub

  • Analytics - Posthog and Google Analytics, i also have my own analytics for the authenticated users

  • LLM - Bedrock as it is cheaper than OpenAI or Claude, offers more models, and customer data stays private

  • Running code - AWS Lambda with RPC, cheap, fast and typesafe. Much cheaper than running the server in the container.

 What about the MongoDB? Good or rather not?

  MongoDB is fine, it'll do the job and the Atlas free tier is generous enough to start. I just wouldn't reach for it for what you're building. Two honest reasons. First, for a small Chrome extension you probably don't want a separate database service at all, you want one thing that gives you DB and auth together, and that's where Supabase earns its keep on a first build. Mongo means wiring up auth and hosting separately. Second, Mongo's no-fixed-schema flexibility sounds great early but it quietly bites you later, it's very easy to end up with messy, inconsistent data when you're moving fast and still learning. A relational DB nudges you into structure you'll thank yourself for. I'm a DynamoDB person myself, but that's an AWS-ecosystem call and honestly overkill for a first extension. For where you are, I'd keep it boring: Supabase for DB and auth, Stripe for payments, and don't add Mongo unless you hit a specific reason you need it. Fewer moving parts is the real cost saving.

 Thank you for explaining it to me! For such my case, I will stay low cost! :D

 Anytime, Nika. Low-cost and boring is exactly right for a first build. You can always add complexity once something is actually working. Good luck with the launch :)

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