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One pick per slot, from hosting to error tracking, for $5 a month before the first customer
A SaaS tech stack for 2026 that costs $5 a month before the first customer: Light Cloud for hosting and Postgres, Clerk for sign-in, Resend for email, Stripe for payments, PostHog for analytics and Sentry for errors, each on its free plan, with the point where each one starts to charge.
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Share code between the apps of a monorepo on Light Cloud with npm workspaces: what builds from a folder, why the container fails, the Dockerfile that fixes it.
Julia
Deploy a monorepo on Light Cloud: one app per repository folder, each with its own Root directory, and pushes that rebuild only the app whose folder changed.
Julia
The cheapest way to run a Docker container that idles most of the day is $0: Light Cloud's Free plan runs your Dockerfile unchanged with no card, and Google Cloud Run's free tier covers it if you set up a billing account. Fly.io is $3.69 for a 512 MB machine, Railway and DigitalOcean $5, and AWS Fargate about $12.49.
Julia
Deploy a GitHub repository to Light Cloud: install the GitHub App, pick the repository, click Deploy. Every push deploys, and pull requests get a preview link.
Julia
Deploy a GitLab project to Light Cloud: connect GitLab, pick the project and branch, then every push deploys, and merge requests get a preview link and status.
Julia
Free hosting without a credit card, ranked by what happens at the limit: Cloudflare's worst case is a Worker that stops until midnight UTC, Light Cloud's is server apps that pause until next month while static sites stay up, and neither can ever bill you. Render deletes free databases after 30 days plus a grace period, and AWS closes the free account after six months.
Julia
Fix 'too many connections for role' on Light Cloud PostgreSQL: check the 10-connection limit, see who holds connections, and size pool max x instances.
Julia
Run database migrations on every Light Cloud deploy: a node-pg-migrate SQL file, npm start running it before the server, and why rollbacks leave the schema alone.
Julia
Vercel alternatives for a full-stack app: Light Cloud runs the frontend, a container API and Postgres for $5 a month with a free staging password, Railway comes to about $6 once its usage is counted, while Vercel Pro is $20 a seat and $20 per project for password protection, with Postgres from a second vendor: Vercel and Neon together come to $20 to $40.
Julia