Building a SaaS with $0: The 2026 Indie Hacker Stack

You don't need VC money. You don't need $100k in AWS credits. You don't need a team of 10.

In 2026, the cost of starting a software company is literally zero. The barrier to entry has collapsed. The gatekeepers are gone.

If you have a laptop and an internet connection, you can build a product that scales to 10,000 users without spending a single dollar on infrastructure.

Here is the exact tech stack I use to ship production SaaS apps for free.

The "VC Trap"

Most developers think they need to raise money to start. They think: "I need money to pay for servers, database, auth, emails..."

This is the VC Trap. When you raise money, you are "Default Dead". You are burning cash every month. You are on a timer.

When you build with $0, you are "Default Alive". You can run your app for 5 years with 0 customers and it won't cost you a cent. This gives you the most valuable asset of all: Time. Time to find product-market fit.

The Stack (The "Free Tier" Kings)

This is the holy grail of 2026 infrastructure.

1. Compute: Vercel / Cloudflare Pages

Cost: $0/month. What you get:

Free SSL.
Global CDN.
CI/CD (Push to git -> Deploy).
DDoS protection. Limit: Generous bandwidth and build minutes. You won't hit this until you have serious traffic.

2. Database: Supabase / Turso

Cost: $0/month. What you get:

Supabase: A full Postgres database. 500MB storage (enough for 100k text rows). Real-time subscriptions.
Turso: SQLite on the edge. Incredible speed. 9GB storage on the free tier (insane).

3. Auth: Better-Auth / Supabase Auth

Cost: $0/month. The Trap: Clerk/Auth0 are great, but they get expensive fast ($0.05 per MAU). The Fix:

Better-Auth: Open source, self-hosted (on your Vercel instance). 100% free.
Supabase Auth: 50,000 MAUs for free.

4. Payments: Stripe

Cost: $0/month. Model: Pay-as-you-go. They take ~2.9% + 30¢ per transaction. Why: They only make money when you make money. That is the perfect alignment.

The "Hidden" Costs (and how to avoid them)

Email: Don't use SendGrid (their free tier is bad now). Use Resend. 3,000 emails/month for free.
Monitoring: Don't pay Datadog $500/month. Self-host Uptime Kuma on a $4 VPS (okay, this is the only cost, but you can skip it initially).
Analytics: Google Analytics is blocked by everyone. Use PostHog (1M events free) or Umami (self-hosted).

The Marketing Strategy (Also $0)

"But I need money for ads!" No, you don't.

In 2026, engineering is Marketing. Don't write a blog post. Build a tool.

Building a SEO tool? Build a free "Meta Tag Checker".
Building a fitness app? Build a free "Macro Calculator".

Launch these mini-tools on Reddit, Hacker News, and X. They drive traffic for years.

Verdict

Stop making excuses about "server costs". Stop waiting for a "technical co-founder" (use ai). Stop waiting for "funding".

The only thing stopping you from building your dream SaaS in 2026 is you. Go ship.