The $30/Year Stack for Launching Small Bets
Every time I launch a new small bet, I need the same boring stuff: professional email, a chat widget, uptime monitoring. The kind of infrastructure that’s completely unsexy but makes you look like you have your act together.
Hey, I’m Lakshmi — I help developers build, deploy, and distribute their SaaS without hiring a team. I also run Stacksweller and Supabyoi.
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Start with Why Your AI Wakes Up Every Morning With No Memory or Clean Code Is Dead.
For years, I overcomplicated this. Custom SMTP servers. Self-hosted monitoring. Elaborate setups that took days to configure and broke whenever I looked at them wrong.
Then I realized something: I was spending more time on infrastructure than on validating whether anyone wanted my product.
So I built a repeatable stack. Total cost: about $30-42 per year, per small bet. Here’s the whole thing.
Domain & Hosting: Cloudflare (Free)
Buy your domain wherever you want, but point the nameservers to Cloudflare immediately.
Cloudflare’s free tier is absurd:
DNS management (fast, reliable)
Free SSL certificates (automatic)
DDoS protection
CDN caching
Cloudflare Pages (unlimited sites, unlimited bandwidth)
That last one is key. Your landing page goes on Cloudflare Pages. Connect your repo, push to main, it deploys. No servers. No bills. No thinking about infrastructure when you should be thinking about whether anyone wants your product.
I run every small bet’s landing page on CF Pages. Zero hosting cost.
Email: Google Workspace (The India Pricing Hack)
You want professional email. hello@yourdomain.com, not yourdomain.help@gmail.com like some kind of digital nomad running a dropshipping scam.
Google Workspace direct pricing: $6/month. Painful when you’re running multiple bets.
Google Workspace through an Indian reseller: Rs.125/month. That’s roughly $1.50.
Same product. Same Gmail experience. Same everything. Just... cheaper, because regional pricing exists and Google apparently forgot to close this loophole.
Recommended resellers: Medha Cloud, Host IT Smart, Shivaami. They’re authorized, they’re legit, and they’ll save you $50+/year per domain.
Setup takes 30 minutes: verify domain, add MX records, configure SPF/DKIM/DMARC so your emails don’t land in spam. Done.
Support: Crisp Chat (Free)
Intercom wants $74/month. For a small bet that might make $0.
Crisp’s free tier gives you:
2 team seats (it’s just you anyway)
Unlimited conversations
Mobile app for notifications
A widget that doesn’t look like it was designed in 2008
Copy-paste their script tag into your landing page. Five minutes.
Upgrade trigger: when you have so many support conversations that you need automation. Which means you have customers. Which means you can afford to pay for things.
Monitoring: BetterStack (Free)
Your app will go down at 3am on a Sunday. This is not a prediction, it’s a guarantee.
BetterStack’s free tier:
10 uptime monitors
1GB logs/month
Email and Slack alerts
3-day log retention
Is 3-day retention enough? For a small bet you’re validating? Yes. You’re not running a bank.
Alternative: Axiom gives you 500GB ingest and 30-day retention if you’re logging more aggressively. Also free.
Error Tracking: Sentry (Free)
Your code will throw exceptions in production that never happened locally. Classic.
Sentry’s free tier:
5K errors/month
10K performance transactions
1 user
90-day retention
For a small bet, 5K errors/month is plenty. If you’re hitting that limit, either your app is broken or you have enough users to pay for it.
Database: Supabase (Free Tier or Self-Hosted)
Every small bet needs a database. Supabase’s free tier is genuinely useful:
500MB database
1GB file storage
50K monthly active users
Unlimited API requests
That’s enough to validate most ideas. The catch: you get 2 free projects total. After that, it’s $25/month per project.
For small bets that graduate to real products, I self-host Supabase on a $6/month Hetzner VPS. Full Postgres, auth, storage, realtime — no project limits, no usage caps. (I’m building a service called Supabyoi to make this dead simple. More on that soon.)
The Complete Stack
Domain — ~$10-15/year
Cloudflare (DNS + Pages) — Free
Google Workspace (India) — ~1.50/month( 1.50/month( 18/year)
Crisp — Free
BetterStack — Free
Sentry — Free
Supabase — Free
Total: ~1.50/month, 1.50/month, 30-42/year
That’s DNS, hosting, professional email, live chat, uptime monitoring, error tracking, and a database for less than a single month of most “startup” tools.
The Rules
Don’t upgrade until you have paying customers. Free tiers exist for validation. Use them.
Keep the setup identical across bets. Same tools, same patterns, same DNS records. You should be able to launch a new bet’s infrastructure in an afternoon, not a weekend.
Resist the urge to self-host. Yes, you can run your own mail server. You can also perform your own dental surgery. Neither is advisable.
When To Actually Upgrade
Google Workspace — You need >30GB storage → $7/mo
Crisp — You need chatbots or >2 team members → $25/mo
BetterStack — You’re pushing >1GB logs/month → $24/mo
Sentry — You’re hitting 5K errors/month → $26/mo
Supabase — You need >2 projects or more storage → $25/mo (or self-host)
Notice a pattern? These are all “you have real traction” problems. Good problems to have.
What’s Not Covered (Yet)
This is the skeleton — the basic infrastructure every small bet needs from day one.
I’ll cover these in separate posts:
Tech stack choices (frameworks, languages, deployment)
Payment processing (Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, regional considerations)
CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, deployment automation)
Landing page patterns (what actually converts)
One thing at a time.
The Point
Infrastructure should be invisible. It should cost almost nothing while you’re validating. It should scale up only when you have revenue to pay for it.
$30/year per bet means you can run 10 small bets for less than most people pay for a single Notion subscription.
Stop building infrastructure. Start shipping products.
This is part of my “Deploy” series — simple infrastructure patterns for solo operators who’d rather build products than manage servers.