My entire tech stack costs $0 and it runs everything

Hey,

People find out I'm building Fokas — a full SaaS with multi-tenant architecture, Stripe payments, client management, invoicing, row-level security — and the first question is almost always "what's your hosting budget." Zero. My stack costs me nothing. And it's not a hacky, fall-over-in-production nothing. It's genuinely capable infrastructure that I would not be embarrassed to put in front of paying customers.

Here's my actual stack. Next.js for the frontend and API routes. Supabase for auth, database, and row-level security. Vercel for deployment. Claude Code for AI. VS Code for editing. GitHub for version control. Excalidraw for planning. Every single one of these has a free tier that is real, not bait.

The piece that surprised me most when I first built on it was Supabase. I came in expecting it to feel like a toy — like something you use to prototype and then have to migrate away from when you get serious. It doesn't feel like that. The free tier gives you a full Postgres database, auth with social logins and magic links, row-level security (which means your database enforces who can see what, not just your application code), realtime subscriptions, and storage. Fokas is a multi-tenant SaaS, right, meaning I'm building it for multiple coaches and creators with completely separate data, and the entire tenancy model runs on Supabase RLS. The database knows which rows belong to which user. That's not a toy feature. That's something companies pay engineers good money to build correctly.

The thing about free tiers in 2026 is that the companies behind them have figured out the product-led growth model. They give you real infrastructure because they want you to hit the ceiling naturally as your thing grows and upgrade because it makes sense, not because they artificially limited what you can do at the start. So you genuinely get to build something real on the free tier. You just have to accept that it won't scale to a million users — which is fine, because you're not at a million users and neither am I.

What I want to push back on is the idea that spending money on your stack signals that you're serious. I've talked to people who are paying $200 a month in tools before they've made a single dollar and somehow feel more legit for it. That's backwards. Spending money you haven't made yet on infrastructure you don't need yet is just anxiety management dressed up as progress. Build on what's free, ship something, and upgrade when you have a reason to.

Fokas is being built entirely on this stack — real architecture, real security model, Stripe integration and everything. None of that has required me to open my wallet before the product is ready. When it outgrows the free tiers — and it will — I'll upgrade then, with revenue that justifies it. That's the sequence that makes sense.

Supabase. I know I just talked about it in the lesson but it deserves its own section. The free tier includes Postgres with 500MB storage, auth for up to 50,000 monthly active users, row-level security, edge functions, realtime, and a dashboard that lets you see and manage everything without writing a migration script every time. The Supabase docs are also genuinely good, which is rarer than it should be.

If you're building something that needs a database and auth — which is most things — start here. Don't pay for a database until you need to. You won't need to for a while. supabase.com.

If you know someone who's waiting to start building because they think they need to spend money first, send them this newsletter. That's the one thing I ask this week.

Yesenia M. Perez Lead Backend Engineer. Mom of 3. Building at 11pm.

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