Full transparency · List prices checked September 2026
Nobody tells you this part before you sign. Then the build is done, the invoice is paid, and you discover the thing needs $120 a month of accounts nobody mentioned. So here is the whole stack — what each piece does, what the free tier gives you, the exact point it runs out, and what it costs after that.
The recommended stack
This is the stack we recommend and the one we run our own products on. Every account is opened in your name, on your card. We are not a reseller — we do not take a cut of any line on this page, and if you fire us tomorrow none of it stops working.
01 · Domain
Free tier: none. There is no free version of owning a name.
You pay: about $23 a year for a .com renewal, so roughly $2 a month. Keep privacy on; most registrars include it free now.
02 · Marketing site hosting
Free tier: real, but it only serves on a webflow.io address. You cannot point your own domain at it.
Free ends: the moment you want your own domain in front of it — so, immediately.
You pay: $15 a month billed annually for a basic site. $25 if you want a blog or any CMS-driven content, which almost everyone does.
03 · App hosting
Free tier: generous, and genuinely good. Custom domains included.
Free ends: on the terms, not on the usage. The free plan is for non-commercial projects. If your app makes money, you are meant to be on Pro from day one — this is the single most commonly ignored rule in this whole stack.
You pay: $20 a month, plus $20 per additional seat if more than one person needs access.
04 · Database, accounts and files
Free tier: 500MB of database, 50,000 monthly active users, file storage included. Plenty for building and testing.
Free ends: earlier than the limits suggest. Free projects pause after about a week with no traffic — fine while building, fatal for a live product — and there are no daily backups, which is the real reason to upgrade.
You pay: $25 a month per organisation. Note it is per organisation, not per project — two separate companies means two subscriptions.
05 · Background jobs and APIs
What it does: the work that has to happen when nobody is looking — scheduled reminders, feed imports, webhooks, anything on a timer.
Free tier: a trial credit only. Not something to plan around.
You pay: $5 a month on Hobby, and the fee is credit toward usage rather than a fee on top. $20 on Pro when you need more.
06 · Mobile build pipeline
What it does: turns your code into the actual .ipa and .aab files the stores accept, and pushes updates without a new store review.
Free tier: exists, on a shared queue. Builds that take 15 minutes on a paid plan can sit for hours on the free one.
You pay: $19 a month on Starter, which includes $45 of build credit. Expect closer to $30 during active development — that is what ours runs at.
07 · Apple Developer Program
Free tier: none. There is no way to put an app on iPhones without it.
You pay: $99 a year, about $8 a month. It must be in your company's name, not ours — an app on somebody else's developer account is an app you do not really own.
08 · Google Play Console
You pay: $25, once, ever. Not a subscription.
Worth knowing: Google's identity verification takes days rather than minutes now. Start it early or it becomes the thing holding up your launch.
09 · Transactional email
What it does: password resets, email verification, receipts. Not marketing email — the mail that has to arrive or people cannot use your product.
Free tier: 3,000 emails a month, which is real and lasts a while.
Free ends: around 100 signups a day, once verification and reset mail adds up. You pay from $20 a month for 50,000.
10 · Error monitoring
What it does: tells you the app crashed before your customer does. Skip this and your first warning is a one-star review.
Free tier: 5,000 errors a month and one uptime monitor. Fine for a small product.
Free ends: when you want more than one thing watched, or a bad release burns 5,000 errors in an afternoon. Team is $26 a month.
11 · Taking money
Stripe: no monthly fee at all. It takes 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, so it costs nothing until you are earning.
RevenueCat handles subscriptions inside the apps: free until you are past $2,500 a month in tracked revenue, then 1% of it.
Three worked examples
These are not estimates from a calculator. The third column is the stack behind our own reentry app, which is in both stores with accounts, payments, AI features and push notifications running.
Domain
$2
Webflow site plan
$15–25
$17–27
per month, all in
No database, no server, nothing to monitor. A site is genuinely this cheap to keep alive, and anyone charging you a hosting retainer on top of this is charging you for nothing.
Domain
$2
Vercel Pro
$20
Supabase Pro
$25
Railway
$5
Resend
$20
Sentry
$0–26
$72–98
per month, all in
You can start nearer $27 by running Supabase and Sentry free while you are still testing. Move both to paid before real customers depend on it — the free database pauses itself and keeps no backups.
Everything opposite
$72–98
Expo EAS
$19–30
Apple Developer
$8
RevenueCat
$0
$99–136
per month, paid by you · includes Apple's $99 a year · plus $25 once to Google, also paid by you
That is the real figure for our own app: both stores, thousands of job listings imported nightly, push reminders, Stripe on the web, in-app purchases on mobile and a full Spanish translation.
Prices are the vendors' published list prices, checked September 2026. They change. Nothing on this page is paid to us.
The costs nobody quotes
These are not in the monthly figure above because they are percentages, not subscriptions. They are the right kind of cost — they arrive with the revenue that caused them — but they surprise people, so here they are.
Apple and Google take 15 to 30 percent of anything sold inside the app. The lower rate applies to most small developers. This is the largest number on the page and there is no way around it if you sell in-app.
2.9% plus 30 cents on the web through Stripe. Considerably cheaper than the stores, which is exactly why we build a web checkout as well as an in-app one where the rules allow it.
Pay as you go, no subscription. Cents per request rather than dollars, but it scales with use — so if you sell AI features, price them in credits and make sure a credit costs the customer more than it costs you.
Databases get bigger and email volume rises. Budget for the stack roughly doubling between launch and a few thousand active users. It is still under $300 a month at that point, which is less than one agency invoice.
Open it up
This is a real development stack — the same one used by companies with engineering teams. It is not FlutterFlow, Bubble, Glide or any other builder that rents you an app you can never take with you. Click into either one and you can see every service, what it does, its free tier, and the exact point the free tier stops being enough.
Why this matters: on a no-code platform your product exists only inside that company's account, at their monthly price, until they change it. Here the code is in your GitHub and every service above can be swapped for a competitor. Nothing on this page is paid to us.
A short call is enough to tell you whether it fits in fourteen days and what it will cost. If it does not fit, we will say so and tell you what would.
Elevated Software Labs