A free tier can cover an MVP's first users if the workload fits its limits and someone owns the upgrade decision. Choose services around your product's critical path, then price what happens when an allowance runs out. A working sign-up, file upload, or deployment matters more than an impressive collection of free accounts.
A verified starting shortlist
Last verified: October 2026. These are public plan allowances, not a guarantee of eligibility or a complete production budget. Dollar amounts below are USD; taxes, exchange conversion, region-specific services, and optional products can add costs. Plans change.
| Need | Representative service | Verified free allowance | Boundary to plan around |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authentication | Supabase Free | 50,000 monthly active users | Other auth delivery costs and abuse controls still need review |
| Database | Supabase Free | 500 MB database | Two active projects; inactive free projects pause after one week |
| File storage | Supabase Free | 1 GB files, 5 GB egress and 5 GB cached egress | Storage capacity and file delivery are separate allowances |
| Transactional email | Resend Free | 3,000 emails monthly, 100 daily | A launch-day burst can hit the daily limit first |
| Product analytics | PostHog | 1 million analytics events monthly | Session replay and other products have separate meters |
| Deployment | Cloudflare Workers Free | 100,000 requests daily, 10 ms CPU per invocation | CPU time can exclude a workload that fits the request count |
| Monitoring | Cloudflare Workers Logs | 200,000 log events daily, three-day retention | Current pricing changes on December 1, 2026 |
| DNS | Cloudflare Free | Authoritative DNS through full setup | Domain registration and renewal remain separate purchases |
| CI | GitHub Free | 2,000 hosted-runner minutes monthly, 500 MB artifact storage | Private-repository allowance; runner and storage rules matter |
The sources in the references verify these particular allowances. We have not established one universal region, data residency guarantee, or commercial-use permission covering every service in the table. Check the applicable product terms, available deployment region, and account eligibility before making a commercial commitment.
That distinction is concrete with Vercel Hobby: its documentation restricts it to personal, non-commercial use. A startup should not treat a functioning Hobby deployment as evidence that its business workload qualifies.
Start with fewer suppliers
For a small web product, one managed backend can provide authentication, database, and files. Add an email sender, hosting, observability, and source control only as the product needs them. Every additional account introduces another credential, billing contact, retention policy, and failure mode.
A useful first inventory has six columns: owner, purpose, region, current allowance, failure at the limit, and replacement or upgrade action. Save a dated copy of the selected plan. The person responding to a failed customer upload should not need to rediscover which organization owns the storage account.
Do the selection after defining the first usable workflow. A booking product needs reliable reservation writes; an image-heavy catalog may reach file delivery limits first. A free analytics allowance should have little influence over the database decision. Our MVP architecture guide explains how to keep those responsibilities clear.
Model one customer action
Use a normal product action as the unit of planning. For an illustrative document approval product, submitting a document could create a database record, store a file, send an email, run background validation, and emit several analytics events. Count retries and previews too.
Multiply those operations by expected daily use and by a plausible launch spike. Keep this as a planning calculation, not a forecast presented as fact. If an average document is large, file delivery can dominate even when the database contains few rows.
Avoid multiplying a daily allowance by thirty and treating it as a monthly pool. Resend's daily restriction can stop an invitation campaign even while most of the monthly allowance remains unused. Schedule sending with a queue and define what the user sees while a message waits.
The same principle applies to CI. A build matrix, repeated previews, and long artifact retention can exhaust different allowances. GitHub documents separate cache storage and shared artifact/Packages storage; deleting an artifact prevents future accrual but does not erase storage already accrued.
Free storage still needs a recovery plan
A working database is not a tested backup. Supabase recommends that free-plan projects make regular exports and keep copies off-site. Its database backups also exclude the file contents stored through the Storage API, so a database restore alone does not recover a deleted customer PDF.
For an MVP holding irreplaceable data, define the maximum acceptable data loss and restore time. Then test an export and restore using representative records and files. Include memberships, permissions, and object metadata in the exercise, since restoring rows without access rules can leave the application unusable.
The right response may be paying before the first external customer. Free plans are useful development tools; the production decision depends on the cost of losing data or missing an order.
Set upgrade triggers before launch
Choose a warning threshold below the vendor's limit and appoint a person who can approve the next plan. A threshold such as half the allowance is an internal operating choice, not a vendor requirement. Check usage during a small pilot to see which meter is actually growing.
Record the intended response for each failure:
- Email pressure: queue non-urgent messages, preserve password and account recovery delivery, and inspect abuse.
- Database pressure: inspect indexes and unnecessary records before increasing capacity.
- File pressure: resize appropriate uploads, limit accepted file sizes, and investigate repeated downloads.
- Analytics pressure: remove noisy or duplicated events while preserving the business funnel.
- Compute pressure: identify the expensive request before assuming more capacity will solve it.
Rate limits, billing caps, and application limits serve different purposes. A billing alert usually informs a person; an upload limit or queue can directly control workload. Verify the actual enforcement behavior for each selected product.
Budget for the first paid month
Keep a second budget beside the free one: the first realistic paid configuration with production, staging, backups, email, observability, and required team access. Include a domain renewal and any tax or currency conversion your business incurs. Region choice can affect latency and cost, so compare a configuration your customers can actually use.
Use free tier cost traps to review the failure boundaries, and MVP analytics planning to keep event collection deliberate. If the first paid month is affordable and the recovery plan is credible, the free allowance is a useful runway rather than a constraint controlling your product.