On this page
Here is the truth nobody tells you when you start: you can launch a real, production-grade Next.js site for the price of a domain name, and pay nothing else until something about your project demands it. Every tool in this stack has a free tier that is genuinely usable in production, not a crippled trial. You only start paying when traffic, team size, or compliance forces the issue, and by then you can afford it.
This page is your money map. It exists so future-you, scoping a new project, knows exactly what the bill looks like at launch and what it grows into. Treat every dollar figure as a snapshot, not a contract. These are real, public prices as of mid-2026, but SaaS pricing drifts, so this page is marked unverified on purpose. Confirm the current number on each vendor's pricing page before you quote it to a client or commit a budget.
The one thing you actually pay for on day one
A domain. That is it. Everything else in this stack starts free.
A standard .com runs about 10 to 15 USD per year through a registrar like Cloudflare (at-cost, no markup), Namecheap, or Porkbun. Premium TLDs (.dev, .ai, .io) run higher, anywhere from 15 to 70+ per year, and .ai in particular is expensive. Buy the domain where it is cheap and point DNS at Vercel; you do not have to host DNS at the registrar.
Register your domain at an at-cost registrar (Cloudflare Registrar charges wholesale with zero markup). Renewals are where registrars quietly gouge you, so check the renewal price, not just the first-year promo.
Do not buy "domain privacy", "premium DNS", or an SSL add-on as upsells. WHOIS privacy is free at any decent registrar, and Vercel issues and renews TLS certificates for free automatically. You are paying for nothing.
The free-tier launch stack
This is the stack this portfolio runs on, and it costs nothing beyond the domain. Each line is a deliberate choice, not a placeholder.
- Hosting: Vercel Hobby (free). Personal projects, unlimited deploys, preview URLs, automatic HTTPS, and a global edge network. The catch is the license: the Hobby plan is for non-commercial use. A personal site, portfolio, or side project is fine. The moment a project makes money or belongs to a company, you owe Vercel the Pro plan, and that is a licensing line, not just a resource limit.
- Database and auth: Supabase Free. Two free projects, 500 MB of Postgres, 1 GB file storage, 50,000 monthly active auth users, and 5 GB egress. That is enough to run a real app with real users. The sharp edge: free projects pause after about a week of inactivity. Fine for a side project, unacceptable for anything someone depends on.
- Transactional email: Resend Free. 3,000 emails per month and 100 per day, one custom sending domain. A contact form or low-volume notifications fit easily.
- Error monitoring: Sentry Developer (free). 5,000 errors and a small tracing/replay quota per month for a single user. Enough to catch the bugs that matter on a small site.
- Analytics: Google Analytics 4 (free). Effectively unlimited for any traffic level you will see early. Vercel Web Analytics also includes a small free event quota if you prefer to keep it on-platform.
When you cross into paying, and why
You do not upgrade on a schedule. You upgrade when a specific limit or rule forces you. Here is the trigger for each line and what it costs when you cross it.
Vercel Pro: ~20 USD/user per month
Two triggers, and the first is the one people miss.
- The project is commercial. A client site, a startup, anything that makes money: Hobby's license no longer covers you, full stop. This is the most common reason to upgrade, and it has nothing to do with traffic.
- You outgrow Hobby's resources or need team features. More included bandwidth and compute, password-protected previews, longer function durations, and team collaboration.
Pro is billed per seat at roughly 20 USD per member per month, plus usage above the included allotment. For a solo developer shipping client work, budget 20/month as the floor and watch usage-based overages if a site gets popular.
Supabase Pro: ~25 USD/month
You move to Pro when any of these is true, and the first one usually arrives before the resource limits do:
- You need projects that never pause. Pro keeps them always-on.
- You exceed 500 MB of database, 50,000 monthly active auth users, or the free egress.
- You want daily backups (7-day retention) and email support.
Pro is about 25 USD per month and includes a usage allowance; you pay metered rates above it. For most small production apps, 25/month is the real number for a long time.
Resend paid: ~20 USD/month
Cross when you blow past 3,000 emails/month or the 100/day cap, or need multiple sending domains and longer log retention. The first paid tier lands around 20 USD per month for roughly 50,000 emails. A contact form will not get you here; a product that emails users (receipts, password resets, digests) will.
Sentry Team: ~26 USD/month
Cross when 5,000 errors/month is not enough, or you need more than one team member in the dashboard, or you want longer retention and more performance/replay quota. The Team plan starts around 26 USD per month and scales with the event volume you reserve.
Analytics: stays free
GA4 stays free at any scale you will plausibly reach as an indie or small team. There is no upgrade pressure here. The only reason to pay for analytics is a privacy-first hosted alternative (Plausible, Fathom) at roughly 9 to 14 USD per month, which is a values choice about cookies and data ownership, not a capacity one.
Avoid
Pre-buying Pro tiers "to be safe" before launch: Vercel Pro + Supabase Pro + Sentry Team + Resend paid from day one is ~90 USD/month for a site with zero users. You are paying for headroom you have not earned yet.
Prefer
Launch entirely on free tiers. Upgrade one line at a time, each only when its specific trigger fires (commercial use, a real limit, a team member). You pay for capacity exactly when you start using it.
The two numbers to remember
These are the figures to carry into any project scoping conversation.
- Starting out (personal / pre-revenue): ~1 to 2 USD/month. Just the domain. Vercel Hobby, Supabase Free, Resend Free, Sentry Developer, GA4. A complete, monitored, production-deployed site for the cost of the name.
- Scaling (commercial, real users, always-on): ~45 to 90 USD/month. The realistic floor is Vercel Pro (20) + Supabase Pro (25) once a project is commercial and needs an always-on database, landing around 45/month. Add Resend paid (20) and Sentry Team (26) as email volume and error tracking demand, and a fully-loaded small production stack sits near 90/month, before any usage-based overages from a genuinely high-traffic site.
Add the cost line to a project the same day you add the requirement that triggers it. When a side project becomes a client engagement, move Vercel to Pro that day; do not run commercial work on a Hobby license.