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Indie SaaS on Vercel
A small-team SaaS on managed PaaS: Vercel hosting + functions, Neon serverless Postgres, Auth0, Algolia search, Twilio SMS alerts, and Datadog observability.
A no-servers-to-size stack where the interesting numbers are per-seat, per-token, and per-search pricing rather than instance sizing.
- Throughput: 1,500 req/sec
- First to saturate: SMS Alerts
- Estimated cost: $515k/mo
How it works
- Vercel
- Hosting and the API in one bill: most requests are served as static edge content, and about a third wake a serverless function. There is no instance to size, only a plan to outgrow.
- Neon Postgres
- Ordinary Postgres, billed by compute hours rather than an instance that runs all month. The saving is real only for traffic with a nightly hole in it, which is why the active hours are worth setting honestly.
- Algolia Search
- Typeahead costs three searches per request, so this line tracks how much users type, not how many pages they load.
- Datadog
- Priced per host plus indexed logs, which is why only a fifth of logs are indexed here. On stacks this size observability is usually the line item that overtakes hosting first.