A few months ago I tried to find a "best stack under 100 USD a month" article for a side project. Every result was either an enterprise list with line items at thousands per month, or a vague "use Vercel and Supabase" post with no actual numbers.

So I built one. The result is cheapstack.dev — an editorial site that publishes itemized reference stacks for indie SaaS infrastructure on 50–200 USD a month, with every line item, the date prices were verified, and what to swap when traffic crosses specific thresholds.

I'm not going to pretend this is a masterpiece. I want to write this post because the things I learned along the way will probably save someone else two weeks.

The build

Stack:

Next.js 16 with output: "export" for static export

Cloudflare Workers Static Assets for hosting (free, unlimited bandwidth)

IBM Plex Sans + Plex Mono for typography

Markdown-driven content layer (no CMS, no backend, no database)

Two-week evening build, mostly weekends.…