The startup software stack on a budget

Add it up for a company that is not yet taking money and not yet commercial on its website: the domain at wholesale, $72 for email, $108 for analytics if you want it from day one, and $0 for the rest. Under $200. The first thing that grows is the per-user chat bill, and the first thing people forget is that the hosting free tier is for non-commercial use.

The domain is the one thing on this list you cannot swap out later without pain, so put it somewhere boring and cheap to renew. Cloudflare Registrar's page says it does not mark up domain prices at all and that registration, transfer and renewal are at or below what registries and ICANN charge (cloudflare.com/products/registrar, checked 6 October 2026). The catch is that your DNS then lives at Cloudflare, which happens to be the easiest place to add email to: the records can be written in one click by a provider that connects to it.

If you already own the domain at Namecheap, Porkbun, GoDaddy or wherever, leave it. Moving a domain to save a few dollars a year is not worth a week of nameserver anxiety at launch.

Most founders default to Google Workspace because it comes with Docs and Drive. On Google's pricing page Business Starter is $7 per user a month on an annual plan, or $8.40 with no commitment (workspace.google.com/pricing and Google's Flexible-plan help page, checked 6 October 2026). Two founders plus hello@, support@ and billing@ as real inboxes is five seats, $420 a year, and it grows with every hire.

A flat-rate host prices the domain instead of the people. Faivelo Starter is $6 a month, $72 a year, for unlimited mailboxes on up to three domains, with the DNS records written at your registrar and a migration tool if you are leaving somewhere. Google Docs still works on a free personal Google account, which is how most small teams square the circle. Our guide to how many email accounts a startup needs lists the addresses to create on day one, and the best email provider for startups ranks the options if you want to shop around.

Notion's Free plan covers a wiki, task boards and published pages; Plus is $10 per member a month billed monthly, with a discount on yearly billing (notion.com/pricing, 6 October 2026). Google Docs on personal accounts is free and is where most pitch decks are born. Pick one and stop.

Slack's Free plan keeps 90 days of message history; Pro is $7.25 per user a month on annual billing (slack.com/pricing, 6 October 2026). Ninety days is longer than most two-person companies need in year one. The moment you catch yourself scrolling for a decision from four months ago, you have outgrown it, and that is a good problem.

Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful domestic card transaction and states that it has no setup or monthly fees (stripe.com/pricing, 6 October 2026). Until you take money it costs nothing, which is the right shape for a company that does not yet know whether it has customers.

Analytics is the one row where the honest budget pick is not free. Plausible's Starter plan is $9 a month for up to 10,000 monthly pageviews, after a 30-day trial with no card (plausible.io, 6 October 2026). The free alternative is Google Analytics, which costs your visitors a cookie banner. Either is fine; just decide.

You do not need a help-desk product to answer your first hundred customers. You need a support@ address that more than one person can open. On a per-seat email plan that is another seat or a shared-mailbox workaround; on a flat plan it is a mailbox like any other, so the row above says $0 extra. Add a real help desk when two people are answering the same ticket twice.

Vercel's Hobby plan is $0 and its FAQ says it is for personal, non-commercial use; Pro is $20 a month (vercel.com/pricing, 6 October 2026). A landing page for a company that charges money is commercial, so plan on Pro from the day you launch pricing, and treat Hobby as the free tier for the prototype. Netlify and Cloudflare Pages have similar shapes; whichever you pick, it will also hold your DNS or sit next to it, which is why email providers that connect to Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare in one click save a founder an afternoon.