The bootstrapper's EU stack for under €10 per month
3 hours ago
- #EU Infrastructure
- #Cost-Effective Tech
- #Bootstrapping
- EU infrastructure stack for bootstrappers costs under €10 per month, focusing on permanent free tiers or very cheap services.
- Hosting: Hetzner Cloud's CX33 server at ~€7/month (4 vCPUs, 8GB RAM, 80GB disk) or Netcup VPS under €5/month, both EU-based.
- Transactional email: Three EU providers offer free tiers for password resets, receipts, etc.
- Newsletters and email marketing: Two EU options have free tiers for hundreds of subscribers.
- Analytics: EU alternatives like Simple Analytics (free for small projects) and TelemetryDeck avoid GDPR issues and cookies.
- Monitoring: UptimeRobot (50 free monitors) for uptime; Healthchecks.io (20 free checks) for cron jobs, with self-hosting options.
- Forms: Tally (unlimited forms/responses free) and Formbricks (open source with free hosted tier) for in-app surveys.
- Authentication: Hanko offers a free tier with passkeys, open source and self-hostable.
- Payments: Mollie (no monthly fees, pay-per-sale) for EU payments; Creem handles VAT/tax compliance for digital products with a percentage cut.
- Scalability: Fixed cost is primarily compute (e.g., Hetzner at €7/month); upgrades are incremental as the product grows.