The $100/Month SaaS Stack: Everything a Small Team Needs
A complete, real-world SaaS toolstack for under $100/month — hosting, database, payments, email, design, analytics, and team tools. Itemized, with what to skip.
We’ve written about the completely free stack for validating an idea, and the $29/month indie stack for a solo maker getting serious. This is the next rung on the ladder: a stack for a small team that’s actually shipping a product to paying customers, with a real budget of around $100 a month.
At this stage you’re past “can I build it?” and into “can I run it like a business?” That means you’ll pay for a few things you used to get by without — but only where it earns its keep. Here’s the whole stack, itemized, with the honest reasoning for each line.
The Stack at a Glance
| Job | Tool | ~Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Docs & planning | Notion | $10 |
| Code & CI | GitHub | $4 |
| Hosting | Vercel | $20 |
| Database & auth | Supabase | $25 |
| Payments | Stripe | usage-based |
| Email (marketing) | MailerLite | $10 |
| Email (transactional) | Resend | $0–20 |
| Design | Figma | $0–15 |
| Analytics | Plausible | $9 |
| Error monitoring | Sentry | $0–26 |
| Team chat | Slack | $0 |
That lands right around $100/month depending on which optional tiers you trigger. Let’s walk through the choices.
Build & Ship
Notion — ~$10/mo. Once you’re a team, the free plan’s limits start to bite. The Plus plan gives you unlimited file uploads and version history, and Notion becomes your single source of truth for docs, roadmaps, and meeting notes. Worth it the moment more than one person needs to find something.
GitHub — ~$4/user/mo. The free tier is enormous, but a small team usually wants the Team plan for protected branches, required reviews, and more Actions minutes. Cheap insurance for not breaking main.
Vercel — ~$20/mo. When you have customers, you want the Pro tier’s better performance, analytics, and headroom on bandwidth and function execution. If you’re on a non-Next.js framework or want to trim cost, Cloudflare Pages can do a lot of this for free — a legitimate way to claw back $20.
The Backend
Supabase — ~$25/mo. The Pro tier removes the free plan’s project-pausing and gives you daily backups, more database and storage capacity, and email support. For a production app holding real customer data, paid backups alone justify the upgrade. You get a real Postgres database, auth, and storage in one bill.
Getting Paid
Stripe — usage-based. No monthly fee; you pay per transaction. If you’re selling globally as a small team and don’t want to think about VAT and sales tax, consider a merchant-of-record option like Lemon Squeezy or Paddle instead — they cost a bit more per sale but handle global tax for you. (We compared all three in this guide.)
Reaching Customers
MailerLite — ~$10/mo. For your newsletter and marketing emails, MailerLite gives you the best polish-per-dollar at small-list sizes. Brevo is the better pick if you have a big list or want SMS too.
Resend — $0–20/mo. Marketing email and transactional email are different jobs. Resend handles your password resets, receipts, and notifications with a developer-friendly API and a free tier that covers early volume. Upgrade only when you outgrow it.
Polish & Insight
Figma — $0–15/mo. One designer can often live on the free tier. Add a paid seat only when a second person needs to edit. Either way, Figma is where your UI lives.
Plausible — ~$9/mo. Lightweight, privacy-friendly analytics that won’t get blocked or bog down your site, and won’t drown you in dashboards you’ll never read. A clean answer to “are people actually using this?”
Sentry — $0–26/mo. Error and performance monitoring so you find out about bugs before your customers email you. The free tier is a fine starting point; upgrade as your event volume grows.
Running the Team
Slack — $0. The free plan is genuinely enough for a small team (the 90-day message-history limit is the main constraint). Prefer unlimited history for free? Discord does the job too. Don’t pay for team chat until you truly have to.
Where We Deliberately Spent — and Didn’t
The pattern across this stack: pay for anything touching customer data or revenue (database backups, hosting headroom, error monitoring), and stay free wherever the free tier is honestly sufficient (team chat, early-stage design, low-volume transactional email).
What we intentionally left out at this budget: a paid CRM, a help desk, and heavyweight project management. At a small-team stage, Notion covers planning, email covers light CRM needs, and a shared inbox covers support. Add the specialized tools when the pain is real — not before.
Make It Yours
This is a template, not gospel. Your product might need a paid analytics suite and no marketing email yet, or the reverse. The skill is matching spend to where you actually feel pain.
Want this tailored to your exact situation? The AI Stack Builder takes your role, team size, and budget and returns a personalized stack with reasoning for every pick. Or browse the full tools catalog to swap any line above.
Find Your Perfect SaaS Stack
Get AI-powered tool recommendations tailored to your needs in just 2 minutes.
✨ Build Your Stack Now