The Indie SaaS stack
For solo or 2-person bootstrapped SaaS — productize-your-skill style. Optimised for low fixed costs and predictable bills.
You're building a $15-99/mo SaaS to escape the day job. Every dollar of fixed cost is a customer you have to acquire to break even. This stack runs at $50-150/mo at MRR <$5K, scales gracefully to $20K MRR without rewrites, and stays free of any line item that bills "per seat".
Hosting + database
Railway gives you Heroku-style push-to-deploy with managed Postgres in the same project. One bill, one dashboard. Render is a fine alternative if you prefer the more conservative scaling model.
Source + DX
GitHub for code. Cursor for editing. Linear for the 1-2 issues you'll actually track. Don't install Jira at this stage.
Auth + payments
Lemon Squeezy or Paddle remove the 6-week sales-tax / VAT setup that Stripe leaves to you. Your time is worth more than the 1% delta in fees.
Email + analytics
Resend for transactional, Loops if you need product-triggered drips. Plausible for analytics — the EU-hosted, banner-free option that won't make your privacy page a legal exposure.
Observability
Sentry for errors, Better Stack for uptime + status page. That's it. You don't need APM at <100K MAU.
Pay for the Indie SaaS stack with the right card
At ~$100/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.
- 01Lemon Squeezy charges 5% + 50¢ vs Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢. Pay the premium for the first 12 months, switch to Stripe + a tax service (Quaderno/Lago) once VAT compliance is staff time you can spare.
- 02Plausible doesn't do funnels. If you need them, swap to PostHog (free up to 1M events) — but PostHog's self-hosted nightmare in scale-to-zero environments is real.
- 03Skip Datadog and observability vendors until you cross 50K MAU or hire a 2nd engineer. Until then, Sentry + Better Stack handles 95% of "is the site up?" questions.