Recurring monthly costs after you launch — the real number.
Most founders budget the build and forget the bill. Six months in, the monthly invoice from Vercel + Supabase + OpenAI + Resend + Sentry shows up and it's the size of a junior salary. Here's the math nobody sends you in the proposal.
TL;DR
A typical post-launch SaaS app in 2026 runs $200–$2,000+ per month in fixed infrastructure costs, before you pay any humans, take any payments, or answer any tickets.
The big swings come from AI/LLM API spend (zero to thousands depending on feature scope), traffic-based hosting (Vercel scales fast), and backups + monitoring (founders skip these and regret it).
The bill, itemized.
Numbers are rounded ranges for a typical post-launch B2B SaaS — say, a founder-led product with 100–5,000 monthly users. Adjust up for consumer apps, down for internal tools.
Free tier covers prototypes. Real production with custom domains, image optimization, and 100k+ requests usually runs $20–$200/mo. Spikes to $400+ on viral days.
Supabase Pro is $25/mo and handles most early SaaS. PlanetScale starts $39. Neon is generous on free tier. Costs scale with row count + bandwidth.
The wildcard. A chat feature with 1,000 active users on Claude Sonnet can run $50–$500/mo. Heavy AI workflows (RAG, agents, code-gen) routinely hit $1k+. Budget 5x your initial estimate.
Resend free tier is 3k/mo. Postmark is $15 for 10k. Most early SaaS lives in this range. Marketing email (Loops, Klaviyo) is a separate line item.
Sentry free tier: 5k events/mo. Anything serious upgrades to $26/mo. LogRocket adds session replay at $99+. Skip these and you debug blind in production.
PostHog cloud free up to 1M events. Plausible $9/mo for privacy-first. Mixpanel free tier is generous but enterprise pricing kicks in fast.
Skip if Supabase Auth covers you. Clerk free tier 10k MAU then $25/mo + $0.02/MAU. Auth0 starts free but becomes shockingly expensive past 1k MAU.
Cloudflare free tier covers most. Vercel image optimization is included to a point. Cloudinary $99 for serious media transformation.
Skipped most. Eventually catastrophic. Even $10/mo to push DB snapshots to S3 saves you from bankruptcy.
BetterStack free tier covers a single status page. Add $25/mo for proper monitoring + on-call rotation.
$12/yr for a .com. SSL is free via Let's Encrypt or your hosting platform. Premium TLDs (.ai, .io) bump this 10x.
GitHub Team is $4/seat. Linear $8/seat. Slack free tier limits message history; Pro is $7.25/seat. Adds up fast on a 4-person team.
The bills nobody warns you about.
- Stripe fees. 2.9% + 30¢ per charge. On $50k/mo MRR that's ~$1,475 evaporated. International cards add 1.5%.
- App Store / Play Store. 15–30% of in-app revenue. A consumer mobile app can lose more to Apple than to AWS.
- Compliance tooling. Drata / Vanta / Secureframe start ~$8k–$24k/year for SOC 2. Founders skip until enterprise customers ask.
- Customer support tooling. Intercom $74–$1,000+/mo. Plain $15/seat. Help Scout $25/seat. Founders DIY this in Gmail and burn out.
- Tax + accounting. Stripe Tax 0.5% per charge. Accounting software $30–$200/mo. CPA at year-end $1k–$5k.
- Domain renewals + brand protection. Buy the .io and the .co and the .ai. Multiply.
Three real shapes.
~$280 / month
Vercel Pro $20, Supabase Pro $25, Resend $20, Sentry $26, PostHog $0, Cloudflare $0, GitHub $4, Linear $8, domain $1, misc $176. Single-founder SaaS, <1k users, no AI.
~$1,400 / month
Same base $280 + Anthropic / OpenAI ~$800 + Pinecone / pgvector hosting ~$80 + Sentry upgrade $80 + Clerk $25 + LogRocket $99 + image processing $36. AI feature with 500 active users running 50 generations each per month.
~$3,200 / month + 15–30% to Apple
Backend $400, AI $1,500, push notifications $50, image hosting $200, analytics $300, customer support $250, app store fees on top of all revenue. The Apple/Google take is the silent killer.
How to budget for this before you build.
- Build a 12-month run-cost forecast in your brief. Show your dev team. Most agencies will quote build but never run cost. Ask explicitly.
- Pick boring infra by default. Vercel + Supabase covers 90% of cases at predictable cost. Custom Kubernetes is a $5k/mo trap.
- Cap your AI spend with budgets in the API console. OpenAI and Anthropic both let you set monthly hard caps. Set them. Today.
- Reserve 6 months of run-cost in cash before you launch. If your forecast is $1k/mo, that's $6k earmarked. Don't ship without it.
- Re-forecast quarterly. Costs drift. AI usage especially compounds. Founders who don't look at the bill get blindsided.
While you're budgeting…
Two free instruments from the IconDevs bench that pay for themselves before you launch: