How to Run Your SaaS for $0/Month in 2025
A practical guide to leveraging the free tiers of Vercel, Supabase, and Resend to launch without spending a dime.
The golden age of bootstrapping is here.
Ten years ago, launching a SaaS meant paying for a VPS, a database instance, and an email server. You started $50/month in the hole before you even wrote a line of code.
In 2025, the infrastructure landscape has shifted. The major players want you to win so badly that they give away incredible power for free.
Here is the exact stack we use at Sabo to help founders launch with $0 in monthly fixed costs.
1. Hosting: Vercel (Cost: $0)
Vercel's Hobby plan is generous enough to carry you to your first $1,000 MRR.
What you get:
- Bandwidth: 100 GB / month
- Serverless Functions: 100 GB-hours
- Deployments: Unlimited (git push to deploy)
Why it works: Unless you are streaming 4K video or doing heavy crypto mining on the server, you won't hit these limits for a long time. Next.js 16 optimizes your images and caches your content automatically, keeping your bandwidth usage low.
2. Database & Auth: Supabase (Cost: $0)
Supabase has the best free tier in the database game. Period.
What you get:
- Database: 500 MB database space (PostgreSQL)
- Auth: 50,000 monthly active users (MAU)
- API Requests: Unlimited
Why it works: 50,000 monthly active users is a massive number. If you have 50,000 users, you are likely making enough money to upgrade. For an MVP, 500 MB of text data is virtually infinite.
3. Payments: Stripe (Cost: 0% fixed)
Stripe doesn't charge you a monthly fee. They only make money when you make money.
What you get:
- Subscription Management: Free
- Checkout Pages: Free
- Customer Portal: Free
The catch: They take ~2.9% + 30Β’ per transaction. But this is a "success tax." If you make $0, you pay $0.
4. Emails: Resend (Cost: $0)
You need to send transactional emails (Welcome, Reset Password, Receipt). Resend is the developer-friendly choice here.
What you get:
- Emails: 3,000 emails / month
- Daily Limit: 100 emails / day
Why it works: For an early-stage SaaS, 100 emails a day is plenty. That's 100 new signups or resets every single day. If you grow past this, the paid plan starts at just $20.
The "Sabo" Advantage
We built Sabo specifically to exploit this "free tier" ecosystem.
Every tool in the Sabo stack was chosen because it has a generous free tier that lets you validate your idea without a credit card.
- Next.js 16 (Vercel)
- Supabase (Database & Auth)
- Stripe (Payments)
- Resend (Emails)
We wired them all together so you don't have to. You can deploy a Sabo project today, and your running cost will be exactly $0.
Conclusion
Money is no longer a barrier to entry. The only barrier is execution.
You don't need investors. You don't need a budget. You just need to build.
With this stack, your runway is infinite because your burn rate is zero. You can afford to experiment, pivot, and iterate until you find product-market fit.
Ready to launch for free? Start with Sabo.