SaaS Running Cost Calculator
What does it actually cost to keep a product online each month? Pick your stage and the pieces you need — hosting, database, storage, CDN, email, monitoring, AI APIs — and see the monthly range.
It also flags which components a free tier still covers at your stage — because early on, most of them do, and you should not be paying for them yet.
Items showing free can realistically run on a mainstream provider's free tier at this stage. That is not a trick — most products genuinely should not be paying for them yet.
This is your running cost — what it takes to keep the product online. It does not include the one-time cost of building it.
This covers the monthly cost of running your product. For the one-time cost of building it, use the SaaS MVP cost calculator → Together they give you a realistic first-year budget.
Typical monthly running costs by stage
The ranges in this calculator reflect real 2026 provider pricing across mainstream hosts. As a rough guide:
- MVP / pre-launch (under ~100 users): $0 – $50/month. Almost everything sits inside a free tier; the domain is often your only real cost.
- Growing (1,000 – 10,000 users): $100 – $600/month as hosting, database, email and monitoring outgrow free limits.
- Scaling (10,000+ users): $700 – $4,000/month for compute, managed database, storage, CDN and observability.
- AI features: priced by usage, not by stage — anywhere from tens to thousands per month depending on volume. Set a hard budget cap early.
Where the free tiers genuinely hold up
Hosting (Vercel, Render, Fly), databases (Supabase, Neon), CDN (Cloudflare), email (Resend, SendGrid), auth (Clerk, Supabase Auth) and error tracking (Sentry) all have free tiers that comfortably carry an early product. The honest advice is to stay on them until you actually hit a limit — paying before that buys you nothing. Upgrade when reliability, support or limits force it, not because a pricing page suggested it.
Related cost breakdowns
Questions about running costs
How much does it cost to run a SaaS per month?
At MVP stage with under ~100 users, most products run almost entirely on free tiers — realistically $0–$50/month, of which the domain (about $12–15 a year) is often the only unavoidable cost. Growing products in the 1,000–10,000 user range typically pay $100–$600/month once hosting, a managed database, email and monitoring move off free tiers. Scaling products past 10,000 users commonly sit between $700 and $4,000/month, and heavy AI usage can add thousands more on top.
Can I really run a SaaS on free tiers at the start?
Yes, and most early products should. Hosting (Vercel, Render, Fly), databases (Supabase, Neon), CDN (Cloudflare), email (Resend, SendGrid), auth (Clerk, Supabase Auth) and error tracking (Sentry) all have free tiers that comfortably handle pre-launch and early traffic. The honest advice is to stay on them until something actually breaks or a limit is hit — paying early buys you nothing. The one cost you cannot avoid is the domain.
What is the difference between build cost and running cost?
Build cost is the one-time cost of creating the product — design, engineering, testing, deployment. Running cost is what you pay every month afterwards to keep it online: hosting, database, storage, email, monitoring and any API usage. Founders often budget carefully for the build and then get surprised by the running cost, or vice versa. You need both numbers to plan a realistic first year.
What usually makes running costs unexpectedly high?
Three things dominate. AI and LLM API usage scales directly with how much your users use the feature, and can move from tens to thousands of dollars a month quickly. Data egress and storage grow quietly as user uploads accumulate. And over-provisioned infrastructure — paying for capacity sized for traffic you do not have yet — is extremely common. The first two are worth setting hard budget caps on from day one.
Paying more than you should?
Over-provisioned infrastructure is the most common way early products waste money. If your bill feels wrong, a short cost audit usually pays for itself.
Cloud cost optimisation →