Part 11 of The Solo App Business Playbook, published in full.
These are the running costs of the stack this playbook describes — the one behind a live two-app business. Not a projection: the plans, the free tiers and the per-transaction fees as they stand in September 2026.
| Stage | Monthly | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Building, pre-launch | ~$0–20 | Domain (annual), Vercel Hobby (personal only) or Pro |
| Launched, <100 customers | ~$20–40 | Vercel Pro, everything else on free tiers, AI usage pennies |
| ~1,000 customers | ~$50–120 | Clerk may cross its free MAU tier; Resend/Upstash paid tiers; AI usage grows with the feature |
| Stores | +$99/yr Apple, +$25 once Google, +~$19 once Microsoft | Only if you go there |
| Stripe | 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction (US); no monthly | Payouts daily/weekly to your bank |
The number that actually matters: your time. The checks and the watch exist so a solo owner can go a week without looking and know nothing drifted.
It is the part of the playbook you can check. Every figure above is somebody else's public pricing page, so you can verify the whole thing in ten minutes — which is the only useful way to decide whether the rest is worth $49.