What a small web app really costs
Three stacks priced by our cost engine at 100, 1,000 and 10,000 monthly users. A static site stays under $1 a month; a small SaaS is about $96 at 1,000.
· 5 min read
"How much will hosting cost?" is usually answered with "it depends". So we priced three common stacks with the same cost engine the stack builder uses, at three sizes, with the builder's default assumptions. Prices were checked in October 2026.
The three stacks
- Static site: a .com from Cloudflare Registrar and hosting on Cloudflare Pages.
- Small SaaS: a .com from Porkbun, Vercel for hosting, Supabase for the database and sign-in, Resend for email, Polar for payments and PostHog for analytics.
- AI app: a .com from Porkbun, Vercel, Neon for the database, Clerk for sign-in, Resend, Claude Haiku 5.5 as the AI model, Lemon Squeezy for payments and PostHog.
The builder picked the cheapest plan that fits each service at each size. All three are treated as projects that make money, so non-commercial plans are left out.
The numbers
Monthly cost, before tax:
| Monthly users | Static site | Small SaaS | AI app |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | $0.87 | $48.92 | $24.32 |
| 1,000 | $0.87 | $95.92 | $82.43 |
| 10,000 | $0.87 | $341 | $408 |
Part of that is the payments service, which only costs money because customers are paying you. With the defaults (3% of users paying $10 a month), revenue is $30, $300 and $3,000 a month at the three sizes. Without the payments service, the stacks cost:
| Monthly users | Small SaaS | AI app | Payments |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | $45.92 | $21.32 | $3.00 on both |
| 1,000 | $65.92 | $52.43 | $30.00 on both |
| 10,000 | $86.80 | $108 | $254 (SaaS, including the $20 Pro plan), $300 (AI app) |
Why the numbers move
The static site stays under $1
The only bill is the domain: $10.46 a year, shown as 87¢ a month. Cloudflare Pages serves static files free with no bandwidth charge, and allows commercial use. Its limit is 100,000 server function requests a day. At 10,000 users, a busy day is about 13,000 requests, well under it.
The SaaS starts at about $46
Two services cost money from day one:
- Vercel Pro, $20 a month. The free Hobby plan is for non-commercial use only.
- Supabase Pro, $25 a month. The builder assumes each user uploads 20 MB of files, so 100 users store 2 GB. That is over the free plan's 1 GB of file storage.
At 1,000 users, Resend moves to its $20 Pro plan. The free plan sends 3,000 emails a month but only 100 a day, and a busy day at 1,000 users is about 133 emails.
At 10,000 users, Supabase adds usage above what Pro includes: $5.25 for database disk over 8 GB, $2.13 for file storage over 100 GB and $13.50 for egress (data sent out to users) over 250 GB. Polar switches to its $20 Pro plan, with lower fees (3.8% + 40¢ instead of 5% + 50¢). On $3,000 of sales, the $20 plan plus fees costs $254 instead of $300.
The AI app starts cheaper, then passes the SaaS
At 100 users, Neon and Clerk are both free, so the AI app costs less than the SaaS. Vercel Pro is the main cost. The AI model costs 40¢.
At 1,000 users, Neon moves to its pay-as-you-go Launch plan, $7.51 here, because 1,000 users at 5 MB each is a 5 GB database, over the free 1 GB. Resend moves to Pro, as above.
At 10,000 users, the model costs $40 a month and Neon $27.40, most of it the 50 GB of database storage. Lemon Squeezy's fee stays at 5% + 50¢, so it takes $300 of the $3,000.
The assumptions
Every number comes from the builder's defaults, which you can change:
- 20 page views per user a month, about 1 MB of data and 1 server function call per page view.
- 2 emails, 100 analytics events and 1 error report per user a month.
- 5 MB of database storage and 20 MB of uploaded files per user, with each file downloaded twice a month.
- A serverless database busy 200 hours a month at its smallest size (0.25 compute units, about 1 GB of memory).
- 10 AI requests per user a month, each with 1,500 input tokens and 500 output tokens.
- 3% of users pay, with an average payment of $10.
- One team member who deploys, one domain, and 10 production deploys a month.
- Domains are priced at the renewal rate, spread over 12 months.
What is not included
- Tax, unless you pick a region under "Show prices with tax" in the builder's Estimated cost panel.
- Vercel's function CPU and memory, which are billed on demand at regional rates.
- Polar's payout fees, the 1.5% extra on non-US cards, and other per-payment extras.
- Anything our data does not track. See how we verify prices for the full list.
What we take from this
- A website can cost less than $1 a month. If you do not need a server, start with static hosting.
- The first bill is usually a plan, not usage. Commercial terms and small free limits (1 GB of files, 100 emails a day) push you onto paid plans long before traffic does.
- Payments grow fastest. At 10,000 users they are the largest cost in both stacks. Most of it is fees taken as a share of money coming in.
- Small AI models are cheap. Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $4 a month at 1,000 users with these assumptions.
Load your own stack into the stack builder and switch between Just me, Launching, Growing and Popular to see where your plans change. Launching, Growing and Popular match the 100, 1,000 and 10,000 users in the tables above. Open Advanced to set an exact number of users or change the assumptions above.