What would it cost to productionize a basic web application? The answer involves good news and bad news.
Bad news: It's difficult to confidently forecast specific costs for many users before we observe usage on a few real users.
Good news: There are free and low-cost options for most requisite services involved in shipping a precommercial or small commercial application. While the first cohorts of users are onboarded, they can be monitored for application usage patterns and high-quality estimates can be generated for the next stage of growth. In addition, many of the expenses for medium to large applications can be qualitatively anticipated and projected with low confidence.
Below are four cost scenarios for a small app built using Blitz.js and monthly sums are in parens as a tldr:
Precommercial (55): 10 monthly active users, none paying, a single developer
Micro (108): 10 monthly active users, all paying, a single developer
Austere Scaling (527): 500 monthly active users, many paying, a single developer, reduced spend with higher risk and lower productivity
Deluxe Scaling (1617): 500 monthly active users, many paying, a small professional development team
Cost scenario notes:
Monthly active users are a count of users that logged in at least once during the month.
The 500 figure is simply illustrative of the situation where low-cost plans are fully utilized. The actual MAU count for when this occurs could vary widely.
Importantly, these cost estimates are not general business costs. These are mostly technical service run costs, and then a few extras in some cases like Zoom or Slack to illustrate optional costs that will enhance the experience of a software development team. Taxes, recruiting software, employee compensation, employee hardware, office space, and more are all ignored.
In many cases, the costs listed do not express the full range of variable cost concerns. Please note the hyperlinks to pricing details for each service for better insight.
Blitz.js allows for serverless hosting on Vercel, so you will not see dedicated web hosting. These costs assume the use of serverless functions on Vercel.
Note: As you approach the low-usage boundary, consider using Flightcontrol. That is a web hosting service that reduces costs and improves developer experience relative to AWS or Vercel in many cases. It also has some Next.js optimizations that will benefit an app written with Next and Blitz.
Precommercial: 55/month
0/month Vercel, code deployment service
0/month GitHub, code storage service
25/month for Supabase, database hosting
15/month Postmark, email as a service
15/month Domain Name Cost + Business Email
0/month Stripe, payment as a service
Micro: 108/month
20/month Vercel, code deployment service
0/month GitHub, code storage service
25/month for Supabase, database hosting
15/month Postmark, email as a service
15/month Domain Name Cost + Business Email
33/month Stripe, payment as a service
Illustrative, assuming 100/mo revenue and 10 charges
Austere Scaling: 527/month
60/month Vercel, code deployment service
supposes 40 for high serverless function use (illustrative)
0/month GitHub, code storage service
25/month for Supabase, database hosting
94/month Postmark, email as a service
supposes 80,000 emails sent in a month
15/month Domain Name Cost + Business Email
333/month Stripe, payment as a service
Illustrative, assuming 1000/mo revenue and 100 charges
Deluxe Scaling: 1617/month
100/month Vercel, code deployment service
3 developer seats = 60 + 40 for high serverless function use (illustrative)
12/month GitHub, code storage service
3 developer seats
75/month for Supabase, database hosting
includes estimated soc2 audit support cost
94/month Postmark, email as a service
supposes 80,000 emails sent in a month
15/month Domain Name Cost + Business Email
1000/month SOC2 auditing
25/month DataDog, system log management
supposes 1.5 million logging events per month with 30-day retention
96/month Google Workspace
Supposes 8 employees on Business Standard
0/month Atlassian for Business
Assumes 10 or fewer employees. Specifically, consider Jira and Confluence.
100/month Zoom
100/month Slack