The tools we'd pick to build a SaaS in 2026

Ask five indie hackers for their stack and you'll get five spreadsheets. This is ours. It's the set of tools we actually use to run StackMemo, plus the alternatives we'd reach for on a different kind of project.

If this is your first SaaS, read the "why you need it" part of each section before the tool names. The tools change every couple of years. The categories don't.

Three rules before you pick anything

1. Boring beats clever. Every exotic technology you add is a thing that can break at 2am with no Stack Overflow answer. Postgres, a mainstream framework and one hosting provider will carry you well past your first thousand users.

2. Free tiers are for validating, not for running. Pick tools whose free tier lets you build and launch, but check what the first paid tier costs before you commit, because that's the price you'll actually pay if the project works. A tool that jumps from $0 to $99/mo is a trap for a project earning $30/mo.

3. Count the total. No single tool will hurt you. Six $9 subscriptions and two annual renewals will. Track it from day one (more on that further down, and yes, that one's ours).

Hosting

Why you need it: somewhere for your app to run. For a SaaS you want push-to-deploy: you git push, the platform builds and serves it. You don't want to be patching a Linux box at this stage. Your time is the scarcest thing you have.

Our pick: Koyeb. It's what StackMemo runs on. Push to git, it builds the container and runs it, with health checks and zero-downtime deploys. The starter tier is enough for a side project, and since your app is a plain container you can leave whenever you want.

Also great:

• Vercel is the smoothest experience if you're all-in on Next.js. Keep an eye on the bandwidth pricing once you get real traffic.
• Fly.io runs your app in multiple regions, close to users. More knobs, more to learn.
• Railway is the friendliest "it just runs" platform and a great first host.

Watch out for: serverless platforms that freeze background work. If your app needs a cron job or a long-running process (ours does, we sync KPIs hourly), check that the platform supports an always-on process. Otherwise you'll end up renting a second service just to run a timer.

Typical cost: $0-20/mo until you have real traffic.

Database

Why you need it: your single source of truth. Pick a relational database unless you have a specific reason not to. Five years of questions you haven't thought of yet ("which users churned after the price change?") are all answerable in SQL later.

Our pick: Neon, serverless Postgres. Two things make it great for a small team. It scales to zero when idle, and a side project's database is idle 95% of the time, so you don't pay for idle. And it has branching: spin up a full copy of production to test a risky migration, throw it away after. The free tier covers most side projects for a long time.

Also great:

• Supabase is Postgres with auth, storage and realtime bundled in. A lot of product for one bill.
• Turso is SQLite replicated to the edge, a good fit for read-heavy apps.
• Plain Postgres on a $5 VPS is the cheapest option, but you own the backups, the upgrades and the 2am recoveries. Only if you enjoy that.

Watch out for: picking a niche database because a launch video impressed you. Every ORM, tutorial, hire and AI assistant knows Postgres. Boring wins here more than anywhere else.

Typical cost: $0-19/mo.

Payments

Why you need it: the moment someone wants to pay you, you need subscriptions, receipts, failed-payment retries, upgrades, downgrades and (the part everyone forgets) sales tax. Don't build any of this yourself.

Our pick: Stripe. Still the default, still for good reason. Subscriptions, customer portal, invoicing, and webhooks that make "user upgraded, unlock the plan" a solved problem. There's no monthly fee. They take roughly 3% per transaction, so your cost scales with your revenue, which means it's $0 until you're earning.

Also great: Paddle and Lemon Squeezy act as merchant of record, meaning they're legally the seller and handle global sales tax entirely. They take a bigger cut and you do dramatically less paperwork. Worth serious consideration if you're selling worldwide from a small country.

Watch out for: webhook handling. Payment bugs destroy trust in a way ordinary bugs don't. Process webhooks idempotently (Stripe retries deliveries, so your handler will see the same event twice) and test the failure path, not just the happy one.

Typical cost: $0/mo plus 3-5% of revenue.

Auth

Why you need it: signup, login, sessions, "continue with Google", password resets. Users judge your product in the first 30 seconds, and auth is the first thing they touch.

Our pick: roll it with your framework's standard library. For us that's Auth.js with GitHub and Google OAuth plus email/password. It's free, it lives in your own database, and there's no per-user meter running against your growth.

Also great:

• Clerk has beautiful prebuilt UI and a generous free tier. You'll ship auth in an afternoon. The meter starts at 10k monthly active users.
• Supabase Auth is effectively free if you're already on Supabase.

Watch out for: offering only email/password. OAuth roughly doubles signup conversion for developer-facing tools, because nobody wants another password. Offer both from day one. Adding OAuth later creates duplicate-account headaches.

Typical cost: $0 self-rolled, $0-25/mo managed.

Code, CI & a public face

Why you need it: version control is non-negotiable, CI keeps you from shipping broken builds, and for indie products your repo is also marketing. A public repo with real activity builds trust.

Our pick: GitHub. Repo, issues, pull requests, Actions for CI, and the star count that doubles as your build-in-public scoreboard. The free tier does everything a small SaaS needs, including private repos and 2,000 CI minutes a month.

Watch out for: CI minutes on private repos if your test suite is slow. Cache your dependencies. A 10-minute build burns through the free tier faster than you'd think.

Typical cost: $0.

Analytics & edge

Why you need it: there are two different questions here, and people mix them up. "Is my site up and are people visiting?" is traffic analytics. "What are users doing inside the product?" is product analytics. Start with the first. Add the second when you have enough users for patterns to mean anything.

Our picks:

• Cloudflare for DNS, CDN, DDoS protection, and enough traffic analytics to know if anyone showed up. All on the free tier. There's no real reason not to put it in front of your app.
• Plausible ($9/mo) or Umami (self-hosted, free) for privacy-friendly web analytics. No cookie banner needed, one lightweight script.

Watch out for: installing a heavyweight product-analytics suite on day one. With 40 visitors, session recordings and funnels are noise. Page views, referrers and signup count answer everything that matters before launch.

Typical cost: $0-9/mo.

Tracking your stack

Why you need it: count the subscriptions so far. Hosting, database, analytics, plus the email and domain still coming below, plus whatever you add later. Individually they're cheap. Together, with annual renewals scattered through the year, they add up quietly. Meanwhile your revenue lives in Stripe, your traffic in Cloudflare, your stars on GitHub, and the question you actually care about ("is this project making or losing money?") has no single place to be answered.

Our pick: StackMemo. Full disclosure: this one's ours, and this exact problem is why we built it. You list each project's services with their costs and renewal dates, connect the tools you just read about (Stripe, GitHub, Neon, Cloudflare, Koyeb), and it pulls your KPIs in automatically on a schedule. Every project gets one page: costs, MRR, net, and the metrics you starred, with trend history. If you're building in public, that page can be shared publicly with exactly the numbers you choose to expose, and nothing else.

Also great (honestly):

• A spreadsheet. Free, and fine for one project. It goes stale the week you're busiest, which is the week you needed it.
• Notion. Flexible, pleasant, and equally hand-updated. Same staleness problem, nicer fonts.

Watch out for: the failure mode of all tracking, which is manual updates. Whatever you use, prefer numbers that update themselves. The tracker you have to maintain is the tracker you'll abandon by March.

Typical cost: free tier for casual use, paid from $4.99/mo.

Email

Why you need it: two kinds, and mixing them up causes deliverability pain. Transactional email (password resets, receipts, verification) has to arrive instantly and individually. Marketing email (newsletters, launches) is bulk. Different infrastructure, different rules. Never send marketing blasts through your transactional provider.

Our pick: Resend. Transactional email with a genuinely pleasant API, plus React-based templates if you're in that ecosystem. Free for 3,000 emails a month, which is a lot of password resets.

Also great: Postmark is the deliverability gold standard, from $15/mo. Amazon SES costs pennies per thousand emails, but you assemble the pieces yourself.

Watch out for: skipping domain authentication. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC records the day you configure your sender. Email sent without them lands in spam, and sender reputation is slow to repair.

Typical cost: $0-15/mo.

Domain

Why you need it: your name on the internet, and the sender identity for the email section above.

Our pick: Cloudflare Registrar. At-cost pricing (around $10/yr for a .com), no upsell maze, and you're already there for DNS. Porkbun is the other honest registrar.

Watch out for: first-year teaser pricing elsewhere (the $2.99 domain that renews at $45), and the renewal itself. A domain is the classic surprise charge: it bills once a year, precisely when you've forgotten it exists. Put the renewal date somewhere you'll actually see it.

Typical cost: $10-15/yr.

The honest total

Category	Monthly
Hosting	$0-20
Database	$0-19
Payments	~3% of revenue
Auth	$0
Code & CI	$0
Analytics	$0-9
Stack tracking	$0-5
Email	$0-15
Domain	~$1 (billed yearly)

A real, running SaaS on this stack costs $10-50/month before you have meaningful traffic, and close to $0 while you're still validating. That's the point: keep the burn near zero so time, not money, is the only thing you're spending.

Track your own stack →. Free tier, no credit card.