Most startups overspend on infrastructure long before they have meaningful traction.
I made the same mistake—until I redesigned my hosting stack from the ground up.
The Problem: Hidden Costs Add Up Fast
A typical early-stage setup (Vercel Pro + common SaaS tooling) looks convenient, but the costs stack quickly:
- Per-developer pricing ($20/month per seat)
- Paid analytics and monitoring
- Bandwidth and serverless overages
- Multiple third-party services glued together
Result: ~$31/month, even with very low traffic.
Full documentation and ready repository https://saasplosion.me/
The Solution: A Lean, Usage-Based Stack
1. Move from Vercel to AWS Amplify Gen 2
AWS Amplify Gen 2 eliminates per-seat pricing and charges purely based on usage.
It includes:
- CDN (CloudFront)
- Serverless functions (Lambda)
- Static hosting (S3)
- Domain and routing (Route 53)
You pay only for what you actually consume.
2. Replace Paid Analytics with Umami (Free Tier)
Instead of paying $10+ per month for analytics:
- I switched to Umami Cloud (free tier)
- Still get page views and performance insights
- No vendor lock-in, no event-based billing surprises
3. Use DynamoDB On-Demand Instead of Fixed Database Plans
Managed database plans often charge a flat monthly fee regardless of usage.
With DynamoDB on-demand:
- No base cost
- ~$0.15 per million operations
- Scales automatically with real traffic
For early-stage products, this is dramatically cheaper.
4. Start with a Prebuilt AWS-Powered SaaS Template
Instead of building everything from scratch, I used a production-ready SaaS template that includes:
- Authentication (AWS Cognito)
- Payments (Stripe)
- Deployment (Amplify Gen 2)
- Analytics setup
This reduced time-to-launch from weeks to one day and eliminated unnecessary engineering cost.
The Results
With AWS Activate credits ($1,000), hosting costs can be effectively zero for up to two years.
The full setup how i made it with the whole documentation and other featueres is describe on https://saasplosion.me/
Top comments (0)