# StackSays

> Interactive tech-stack decisions for builders. Enter your usage, budget and constraints; get a ranked verdict with real, dated pricing — never a wall of prose.

Every price on this site is taken from the vendor's official pricing page and stamped
with the date we verified it. All calculations are deterministic code locked by tests;
fit weights are editorial estimates labeled as such. Pages are interactive calculators:
the numbers below are defaults, and every page recomputes for the visitor's own inputs.

## Decision tools (interactive)

- https://stacksays.com/stack-builder : full-stack composer — one set of inputs prices every layer
- https://stacksays.com/which-database : Enter your users, data size, budget and constraints — get a ranked database verdict with real, dated pricing. Supabase, Firebase, Neon, Convex, Turso, PlanetScale, MongoDB.
- https://stacksays.com/which-email-api : Set your monthly volume and constraints — get a ranked email-provider verdict with the real monthly bill. Resend, Postmark, SES, Mailgun, SendGrid.
- https://stacksays.com/which-auth-provider : Set your monthly active users and constraints — get a ranked auth verdict with the real bill at YOUR scale. Clerk, Better Auth, Auth0, Supabase, Kinde, WorkOS.
- https://stacksays.com/which-ai-model : Set your monthly token volume and budget — get a ranked model verdict with the real API bill. GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, priced from live data.
- https://stacksays.com/which-payment-provider : Set your revenue and ticket size — get a ranked verdict with real effective fees. Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, including the MoR tax question.
- https://stacksays.com/which-hosting : Set your bandwidth, requests and server needs — get a ranked hosting verdict with the real monthly bill. Vercel, Cloudflare, Netlify, Railway, Render, Fly, Hetzner.

## Verified pricing facts (as of the dates shown)

- Supabase (Database & Backend Platform): free tier: 500MB database, 50K MAU, 1GB file storage, 5GB egress, 2 projects; paid from $25/mo (Pro plan). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Neon (Database & Backend Platform): free tier: 0.5GB storage + 100 compute-hours per project, 5GB egress, 60K auth MAU. Verified 2026-07-15.
- Firebase (Firestore) (Database & Backend Platform): free tier: 1GiB Firestore, 50K reads / 20K writes / 20K deletes per day, 50K auth MAU, 10GiB egress. Verified 2026-07-15.
- Convex (Database & Backend Platform): free tier: 1M function calls, 0.5GB database, 1GB file storage, 1GB egress; paid from $25/mo (Professional). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Turso (Database & Backend Platform): free tier: 100 databases, 5GB storage, 500M rows read / 10M rows written per month; paid from $4.99/mo (Developer plan). Verified 2026-07-15.
- PlanetScale (Database & Backend Platform): no permanent free tier; paid from $15/mo (PS-5 HA cluster). Verified 2026-07-15.
- MongoDB Atlas (Database & Backend Platform): free tier: 512MB storage, shared CPU/RAM, ~100 ops/sec cap; paid from $8/mo (Flex tier). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Resend (Transactional Email): free tier: 3,000 emails/month (100/day), 1 domain; paid from $20/mo (Pro 50K). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Postmark (Transactional Email): free tier: 100 emails/month, full features; paid from $15/mo (Basic). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Amazon SES (Transactional Email): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-15.
- Mailgun (Transactional Email): free tier: 100 emails/day; paid from $15/mo (Basic). Verified 2026-07-15.
- SendGrid (Transactional Email): no permanent free tier; paid from $19.95/mo (Essentials). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Clerk (Authentication): free tier: 50,000 monthly retained users (MRU), full features; paid from $25/mo (Pro). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Better Auth (Authentication): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-15.
- Auth0 (Authentication): free tier: 25,000 MAU, no credit card; paid from $35/mo (Essentials). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Supabase Auth (Authentication): free tier: 50,000 MAU on the Supabase free plan; paid from $25/mo (Pro (platform)). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Firebase Auth (Authentication): free tier: 50,000 MAU at no charge. Verified 2026-07-15.
- Kinde (Authentication): free tier: 10,500 MAU free forever; paid from $25/mo (Pro). Verified 2026-07-15.
- WorkOS (Authentication): free tier: First 1,000,000 MAU free. Verified 2026-07-15.
- Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8 (AI Model (LLM API)): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-13.
- Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 (AI Model (LLM API)): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-13.
- Anthropic Claude Haiku 4.5 (AI Model (LLM API)): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-13.
- OpenAI GPT-5 (AI Model (LLM API)): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-13.
- OpenAI GPT-5 Mini (AI Model (LLM API)): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-13.
- OpenAI GPT-5 Nano (AI Model (LLM API)): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-13.
- Google Gemini 2.5 Pro (AI Model (LLM API)): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-13.
- Google Gemini 2.5 Flash (AI Model (LLM API)): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-13.
- DeepSeek V4 Pro (AI Model (LLM API)): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-13.
- DeepSeek V4 Flash (AI Model (LLM API)): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-13.
- Stripe (Payments & Billing): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-15.
- Paddle (Payments & Billing): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-15.
- Lemon Squeezy (Payments & Billing): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-15.
- Polar (Payments & Billing): no permanent free tier; paid from $20/mo (Pro (MoR)). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Vercel (Hosting & Deployment): free tier: 100GB fast data transfer, 1M invocations, 1 seat; paid from $20/mo (Pro). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Cloudflare (Workers + Pages) (Hosting & Deployment): free tier: 100K Worker requests/day (~3M/mo), unlimited static requests and bandwidth; paid from $5/mo (Workers Standard). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Netlify (Hosting & Deployment): free tier: 300 credits/month ≈ 15GB bandwidth equivalent; paid from $20/mo (Pro). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Railway (Hosting & Deployment): no permanent free tier; paid from $5/mo (Hobby). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Render (Hosting & Deployment): free tier: 512MB / 0.1 CPU, 100GB bandwidth; paid from $7/mo (Starter). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Fly.io (Hosting & Deployment): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-15.
- Hetzner Cloud (VPS + Coolify) (Hosting & Deployment): no permanent free tier; paid from $4.99/mo (CX22 VPS). Verified 2026-07-15.
- Sentry (Error & Log Monitoring): free tier: 5K errors + 5GB logs + 5M spans/month, 1 user, 30-day lookback; paid from $26/mo (Team). Verified 2026-07-17.
- GlitchTip (Error & Log Monitoring): free tier: 1,000 events/month, unlimited projects and team members; paid from $15/mo (Small). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Better Stack (Error & Log Monitoring): free tier: 3GB logs + 3GB traces (3-day retention), 10 uptime monitors, 1 status page; paid from $30/mo (Telemetry Nano). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Axiom (Error & Log Monitoring): free tier: 500GB/month ingest, 30-day retention, 25GB storage, no credit card; paid from $25/mo (Axiom Cloud). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Grafana Cloud (Error & Log Monitoring): free tier: 50GB logs + 50GB traces + 50GB profiles + 10K metric series, 3 users, 14-day retention; paid from $19/mo (Pro). Verified 2026-07-17.
- New Relic (Error & Log Monitoring): free tier: 100GB/month all-telemetry ingest, 1 full-platform user, retention ≥8 days; paid from $10/mo (Standard). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Datadog (Error & Log Monitoring): no permanent free tier; paid from $15/mo (Infrastructure Pro + logs). Verified 2026-07-17.
- PostHog (Product & Web Analytics): free tier: 1M events + 5K session replays + 1M feature-flag requests free every month, unlimited team members. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Plausible (Product & Web Analytics): no permanent free tier; paid from $9/mo (Starter 10K). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Fathom (Product & Web Analytics): no permanent free tier; paid from $15/mo (100K). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Umami Cloud (Product & Web Analytics): free tier: 100K events/month, 1 website, 6-month retention; paid from $20/mo (Pro). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Mixpanel (Product & Web Analytics): free tier: 1M events/month (hard cap), 10K session replays, max 5 saved reports. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Amplitude (Product & Web Analytics): free tier: 2M events/month forever, 10K session replays, no credit card. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Google Analytics 4 (Product & Web Analytics): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Simple Analytics (Product & Web Analytics): no permanent free tier; paid from $20/mo (Paid 100K). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Inngest (Background Jobs & Queues): free tier: 50K executions + 500K events/month, 5 concurrent runs — functions PAUSE when exhausted; paid from $99/mo (Pro). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Trigger.dev (Background Jobs & Queues): no permanent free tier; paid from $10/mo (Hobby). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Upstash QStash (Background Jobs & Queues): free tier: 1,000 messages/day (≈30K/month), 10 schedules, parallelism 10. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Temporal Cloud (Background Jobs & Queues): no permanent free tier; paid from $100/mo (Essentials). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Hatchet (Background Jobs & Queues): no permanent free tier; paid from $500/mo (Team). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Cloudflare Queues + Workers Cron (Background Jobs & Queues): free tier: 10K queue ops/day (≈3K delivered messages), 100K worker requests/day, 10ms CPU per invocation, 24h retention; paid from $5/mo (Workers Paid). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Vercel Cron (Background Jobs & Queues): no permanent free tier; paid from $20/mo (Pro). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Railway Cron (Background Jobs & Queues): no permanent free tier; paid from $5/mo (Hobby). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Crisp (Customer Support): free tier: 2 seats free forever: chat widget, shared inbox, mobile/desktop apps, 100 profiles; paid from $45/mo (Mini). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Intercom (Customer Support): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Plain (Customer Support): free tier: yes; paid from $299/mo (Horizon). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Chatwoot (Customer Support): free tier: 2 agents, 500 conversations/month, live-chat channel only, 30-day retention. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Zendesk (Customer Support): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Help Scout (Customer Support): free tier: Up to 5 users, 1 inbox, 1 Docs site — but only 100 contacts/month. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Tawk.to (Customer Support): no permanent free tier; paid from $39/mo (Free + Remove Branding). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Front (Customer Support): free tier: yes. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Deepgram (Speech-to-Text API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- AssemblyAI (Speech-to-Text API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- OpenAI Transcription (Speech-to-Text API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Groq (Whisper) (Speech-to-Text API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Google Cloud Speech-to-Text (Speech-to-Text API): free tier: First 60 minutes/month free on V1, recurring monthly. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Cartesia (STT) (Speech-to-Text API): free tier: 20K credits/month ≈ 1h51m STT (vendor's own approximation); paid from $5/mo (Pro). Verified 2026-07-17.
- ElevenLabs (Text-to-Speech API): free tier: 10K credits/month (≈10K characters); NO commercial license; paid from $6/mo (Starter). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Deepgram Aura (Text-to-Speech API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Groq (Orpheus) (Text-to-Speech API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Cartesia (TTS) (Text-to-Speech API): free tier: 20K credits/month ≈ 27 TTS minutes (vendor approximation; ≈1 credit/char, our estimate); paid from $5/mo (Pro). Verified 2026-07-17.
- OpenAI GPT Image (Image Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Black Forest Labs (FLUX) (Image Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- fal.ai (Image Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Replicate (Image Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Stability AI (Image Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Google Gemini Image (Image Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Ideogram (Image Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Recraft (Image Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Modal (Serverless GPU Cloud): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Beam (Serverless GPU Cloud): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- RunPod Serverless (Serverless GPU Cloud): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Replicate (Serverless GPU Cloud): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Baseten (Serverless GPU Cloud): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Fal (Serverless GPU Cloud): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Lambda (Serverless GPU Cloud): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Cloudflare R2 (Object Storage): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Tigris (Object Storage): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Backblaze B2 (Object Storage): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Bunny Storage (Object Storage): no permanent free tier; paid from $1/mo (Standard (HDD)). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Wasabi (Object Storage): no permanent free tier; paid from $7.99/mo (Pay-as-you-go). Verified 2026-07-17.
- AWS S3 Standard (Object Storage): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Supabase Storage (Object Storage): free tier: 1GB storage + 5GB egress on the free Supabase project; paid from $25/mo (Pro plan). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Algolia (Search): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Meilisearch (Search): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Typesense (Search): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Elasticsearch (Search): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- OpenSearch (Search): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Postgres full-text search (Search): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- pgvector (Postgres) (Vector Database): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Pinecone (Vector Database): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Qdrant (Vector Database): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Weaviate (Vector Database): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Milvus / Zilliz (Vector Database): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Chroma (Vector Database): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- turbopuffer (Vector Database): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- shadcn/ui (React UI Component Library): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Radix UI (React UI Component Library): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- MUI (Material UI) (React UI Component Library): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Chakra UI (React UI Component Library): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Mantine (React UI Component Library): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Ant Design (React UI Component Library): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- WebSockets (Realtime Transport): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Server-Sent Events (SSE) (Realtime Transport): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Long polling (Realtime Transport): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Managed realtime (Pusher / Ably / Supabase Realtime) (Realtime Transport): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Voyage 3 Lite (Embedding API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Voyage 3 (Embedding API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Voyage 3 Large (Embedding API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Google Gemini Embedding (Embedding API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Google Gemini Embedding 2 (multimodal) (Embedding API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Wan 2.5 (fal) (Video Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Kling 2.5 Turbo Pro (fal) (Video Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Wan 2.1 i2v 480p (Replicate) (Video Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Wan 2.1 i2v 720p (Replicate) (Video Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Veo 3 (fal) (Video Generation API): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- PostHog Feature Flags (Feature Flags): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Flagsmith (Feature Flags): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Unleash (Feature Flags): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- ConfigCat (Feature Flags): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- LaunchDarkly (Feature Flags): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Instatus (Status Page): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Better Stack (Status Page): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Atlassian Statuspage (Status Page): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Uptime Kuma (Status Page): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Transaction-mode pooler (Supavisor / Neon pooler / PgBouncer / RDS Proxy) (Serverless DB Connections): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Neon serverless driver (HTTP/WS) (Serverless DB Connections): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Cloudflare Hyperdrive (Serverless DB Connections): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Prisma Accelerate (Serverless DB Connections): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Upstash Redis (Serverless Cache / KV): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Cloudflare Workers KV (Serverless Cache / KV): free tier: 100K reads/day + 1K writes/day + 1GB (daily limits — demo scale); paid from $5/mo (Workers Paid). Verified 2026-07-17.
- Sanity (Headless CMS): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Strapi (Headless CMS): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Payload (Headless CMS): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Contentful (Headless CMS): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Storyblok (Headless CMS): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Directus (Headless CMS): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Cloudinary (Image / Media Handling): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Cloudflare Images (Image / Media Handling): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- ImageKit (Image / Media Handling): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- next/image (framework-native) (Image / Media Handling): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Bunny Optimizer (Image / Media Handling): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Next.js (Web Framework): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Remix / React Router (Web Framework): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- SvelteKit (Web Framework): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Nuxt (Web Framework): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Astro (Web Framework): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- TanStack Start (Web Framework): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- React Native (Expo) (Mobile App Stack): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Flutter (Mobile App Stack): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Native (Swift / Kotlin) (Mobile App Stack): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- PWA (installable web app) (Mobile App Stack): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Capacitor (web wrapper) (Mobile App Stack): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- GitHub Actions (CI/CD): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- GitLab CI (CI/CD): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- CircleCI (CI/CD): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Buildkite (CI/CD): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Plain .env files (Secrets Management): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Doppler (Secrets Management): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Infisical (Secrets Management): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- HashiCorp Vault (Secrets Management): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Docusaurus (Docs Tooling): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Mintlify (Docs Tooling): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Nextra (Docs Tooling): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- Starlight (Astro) (Docs Tooling): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.
- GitBook (Docs Tooling): no permanent free tier. Verified 2026-07-17.

## Change tracking

- https://stacksays.com/changelog : dated, sourced record of vendor pricing changes (killed free tiers, billing-model switches, price rises)
- https://stacksays.com/methodology : how numbers are sourced, calculated and labeled