April 5, 2026 | 9 min read
When people hear that we run five live SaaS products -- each with its own frontend, backend API, database, and custom domain -- they assume we are spending hundreds of dollars a month on infrastructure. The reality is closer to $35. Sometimes less, depending on the month.
We are Obsidian Clad Labs, a small group of friends from Tennessee who build software products. We are bootstrapped, which means every dollar matters. We cannot afford to spend $50 per service just because that is the default starting plan. So we got creative with how we architect, deploy, and operate our products. Here is the full breakdown.
The Architecture Pattern
Every one of our products follows the same basic structure: a Next.js frontend deployed to a static hosting provider with a generous free tier, a Python FastAPI backend deployed to a container hosting platform, and a PostgreSQL database running alongside the backend. DNS and SSL are handled by a free CDN provider.
This pattern is not novel, but it is consistently cheap. The frontend hosting is free for all five products because static sites and serverless functions on modern hosting platforms cost effectively nothing at low traffic volumes. The backends and databases are where the costs live, and even those are modest when you are thoughtful about resource allocation.
Frontends: $0/Month
All five frontends run on a hosting platform's free tier. Each product gets its own project, its own custom domain, and automatic deployments on every git push. The free tier includes SSL certificates, edge caching, and serverless functions for any server-side rendering. For a product with a few hundred users, you will never exceed the free tier limits.
The key insight is that modern frontend hosting has become commoditized. The providers make their money from enterprise customers, and the free tier is genuinely sufficient for early-stage products. We have run five products for months without paying a cent for frontend hosting. When one product starts generating meaningful revenue, we will happily upgrade to a paid tier. Until then, free works.
Backends: ~$5-7 Per Service
Each backend runs as a container on a platform-as-a-service provider that charges based on actual resource usage rather than fixed plans. A typical FastAPI backend for one of our products uses about 256MB of RAM and minimal CPU when idle. The monthly cost works out to roughly $5 to $7 per service, depending on traffic.
The trick is keeping your services lean. We do not run background workers, cron jobs, or heavy processing on the same service as the API. If a product needs GPU processing (one of ours does, for image work), that runs on a separate serverless GPU platform that charges per-second of compute time rather than keeping an expensive GPU instance running 24/7.
Five backends at $5 to $7 each puts us at $25 to $35 for all backend compute. That includes the databases, because our hosting provider bundles PostgreSQL with the backend service at no additional cost for small databases.
DNS and SSL: $0/Month
All of our domains use a CDN provider's free plan for DNS management and SSL certificates. The free tier includes unlimited DNS queries, automatic SSL certificate provisioning and renewal, basic DDoS protection, and a global CDN. We manage all of our domains -- including subdomains for API endpoints -- through this single provider.
Domain registration itself costs about $10 to $15 per year per domain, but that is a one-time annual cost, not a monthly infrastructure expense. We have ten domains registered across all our products and the company site. That works out to less than $15 per month amortized, but we do not count it as infrastructure cost because it is a fixed business expense regardless of how the product is hosted.
Object Storage: $0-2/Month
Four of our five products use object storage for persistent file storage -- user uploads, generated PDFs, processed images. We use a provider that offers a generous free tier with 10GB of storage and no egress fees. At our current scale, we stay within the free tier for most products. One product occasionally crosses into paid territory during busy months, adding $1 to $2. For most small SaaS products, free-tier object storage will be more than sufficient for the first year.
Email: $0-3/Month
Transactional email (password resets, welcome emails, notifications) runs through a provider with a free tier that covers several thousand emails per month. At our current user count, we stay well within that limit across all five products. Business email (team inboxes, support addresses) runs through a workspace provider at about $6 per user per month, but that is a team cost rather than a per-product infrastructure cost.
The Principles Behind the Numbers
Keeping infrastructure costs this low is not about being cheap. It is about being disciplined. Here are the principles we follow.
Use free tiers aggressively. Most cloud providers offer free tiers that are more than sufficient for products with fewer than a thousand active users. Do not pay for a Pro plan until you have outgrown the free one. Read the limits carefully and design your architecture around them.
Share patterns, not infrastructure. Our five products share the same architectural pattern (Next.js + FastAPI + PostgreSQL), the same deployment workflow (git push triggers auto-deploy), and the same monitoring approach. But they do not share databases, servers, or accounts. Each product is independently deployable and independently billable. If one product takes off, its costs scale independently.
Only pay for what you need. Usage-based pricing is your friend as a bootstrapped founder. Fixed monthly plans that charge $20 to $50 per service regardless of usage will eat you alive when you are running multiple products. Choose providers that charge based on actual compute, storage, and bandwidth consumed.
Do not over-provision. A backend serving a handful of users does not need 1GB of RAM, a dedicated database server, or a load balancer. Start with the minimum viable resources and scale up only when monitoring tells you that you need to. We have products running happily on 256MB containers that handle their current traffic without breaking a sweat.
When This Approach Stops Working
To be clear, this setup works because we are early-stage. We have dozens of users, not thousands. When a product starts generating meaningful revenue and attracting real traffic, infrastructure costs will go up. Databases will need more storage. Backends will need more memory. We will probably want dedicated monitoring, logging, and alerting services.
But that is a good problem to have. The goal is not to run five products on $35 forever. The goal is to survive long enough for one of those products to generate enough revenue to justify proper infrastructure spending. Until then, every dollar we do not spend on servers is a dollar we can spend on reaching the next customer.
The Full Monthly Breakdown
Here is the honest breakdown of what we pay each month to keep five live SaaS products running with custom domains, SSL, databases, APIs, and transactional email:
Frontend hosting for five products: $0. Backend compute for five services: $25 to $35. Database hosting (bundled): $0. DNS and SSL: $0. Object storage: $0 to $2. Transactional email: $0 to $3. Total: roughly $25 to $40 per month, averaging $35 in a typical month.
That is not a typo. Five live products with full stacks for the price of a few cups of coffee. If you are a solo founder or small team thinking about launching multiple products, do not let infrastructure costs scare you. It has never been cheaper to build.
Built by Obsidian Clad Labs -- a group of friends from Tennessee building software that protects people.
tags: saas, startup, webdev, beginners
Originally published at TeachShield Blog
Built by Obsidian Clad Labs — a group of friends from Tennessee building software that protects people.
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