The Solo Builder stack
For freelancers, indie consultants, and 1-person product teams. Optimised for ZERO recurring spend until you have customers.
You're a one-person operation. Recurring SaaS spend is your enemy until proven necessary. This stack stays under $20/mo until you have paying customers. Every line item earns its place by killing a recurring friction in your workflow — not because someone called it "best in class" on a podcast.
Build + ship
GitHub free, Vercel free, Cursor (paid only because the productivity gain pays back in week one). Cloudflare for everything network-adjacent.
Database + email
Supabase OR Neon — both have free tiers that cover indie projects. Resend free tier covers transactional email up to 3K/mo.
Workflow
Notion for everything. Linear for the issues that actually matter. Plausible for analytics with no privacy headache.
AI assist
One model API, one IDE assistant. More than that and you're paying twice for the same value.
Pay for the Solo Builder stack with the right card
At ~$13/mo USD spend (the midpoint of this stack's burn range), the right card recovers 1.5–4% in forex savings + rewards. Default retail cards lose 3.5% of every USD subscription to forex.
EXPRESS
Amex Hilton Honors
No-fx US card — pay USD with USD, zero markup; 3% rewards on engineering spend
IDFC FIRST Wow
0% forex markup vs 3.5% on retail Indian cards
Tradeoffs & pitfalls
The honest stuff. No vendor blog will tell you this.
- 01The free tiers in this stack assume you're below 100K monthly visitors. Past that, expect $30-80/mo in marginal cost across hosting + DB. Still trivial.
- 02You'll get tempted by per-seat tools (Linear paid, Notion paid, Slack paid). Resist until you actually have a team — even THEN, only adopt the SKU you'll use weekly.
- 03Resend's free tier doesn't include broadcast email. When you start a newsletter, swap to a paid tier or move broadcasts to Loops.