Indie hacker stack 2026 — every tool I pay for, $47/month total

· Insights

My full indie stack — hosting, domain, email, payments, analytics, dev tools. Total: $47/month. Here's every tool and why I picked it over alternatives.

My full indie stack — every tool I pay for, $47/month total. Here's the breakdown, what each replaces, and why I picked it over alternatives. If you're a solo founder or indie hacker, this is the field-tested version.

The full stack

Why each one

Netlify ($19/month)

I tried Vercel Pro, Cloudflare Pages, and self-hosted with Caddy. Netlify won because:

  • Deploy previews for every PR (critical for catching visual bugs)
  • Forms handling built-in (no need for Formspree on small sites)
  • Edge functions + image optimization in one platform
  • Free 100GB bandwidth/month (Vercel Pro charges for overage)

The $19/month Pro tier gets 1TB bandwidth and team members. For a solo dev, the free tier is enough to start — I upgraded only when traffic hit ~5k visitors/month.

Cloudflare Registrar ($10/year for .com)

Cloudflare sells domains at cost — no markup. A .com is $10.07/year versus GoDaddy's $19.99/year. The DNS is free and the fastest I've tested.

The catch: Cloudflare doesn't support all TLDs. If you want a .ai or .app, check availability first.

Buttondown ($9/month for up to 1,000 subscribers)

I tried Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Beehiiv, and Substack. Buttondown won because:

  • Markdown-native (I write in MD anyway)
  • Clean API (can subscribe people from my own forms)
  • No tracking pixels, no GDPR consent banner needed
  • $9/month flat for 1,000 subs (Mailchimp is $13+ for similar)

Substack is free but takes 10% of paid subscriptions and forces their branding. Beehiiv is great but $39/month starting. Buttondown is the indie sweet spot.

Stripe ($0/month + 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction)

Stripe is the default for a reason. No monthly fee, instant onboarding, the best docs in the industry. I use Payment Links for everything — no need to build a checkout page.

For comparison: - PayPal: cheaper (2.49% + 49¢) but worse UX and dev experience - Paddle: handles VAT/sales tax for you, but 5% + 50¢ per transaction - Lemon Squeezy: Paddle alternative, similar pricing

If you sell to EU customers and don't want to handle VAT, use Paddle or Lemon Squeezy. Otherwise, Stripe.

Umami (self-hosted, free)

Google Analytics 4 is invasive and overkill for indie sites. Plausible is $9/month for 10k events. Umami is open-source, self-hosted, free.

Runs on the same Hetzner VPS as my other self-hosted tools. Tracks page views, referrers, basic events. No cookies, no consent banner, no privacy policy update needed.

Hetzner CX21 ($5/month)

Hetzner is half the price of DigitalOcean for the same specs. CX21 = 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 40GB SSD, 20TB transfer. I run:

  • Umami (analytics)
  • Vaultwarden (passwords)
  • FreshRSS (RSS reader)
  • SearXNG (search aggregator)
  • Caddy (reverse proxy + auto-SSL)

All on the same $5/month box. CPU usage hovers around 8%.

UptimeRobot (free tier)

50 monitors, 5-minute intervals, free. Email + Slack alerts. The free tier is enough for any indie site — I monitor my homepage, my API, and my self-hosted services.

GlitchTip (self-hosted, free)

Open-source Sentry alternative. Catches errors from my web apps, sends them to a dashboard I control. The setup is more involved than Sentry's "add a script tag," but it's free and the data stays mine.

For a solo dev with one or two apps, the free Sentry tier is fine. I self-host GlitchTip because I have 5+ apps and would exceed Sentry's free tier.

What I don't pay for

  • IDE: VS Code (free) + Cursor (free tier). I don't pay for Cursor Pro because Claude Code Max covers my agentic work.
  • AI: I use Claude Code Max ($100/mo), but that's a separate "tools" budget, not part of the indie stack. For pure indie work, free tiers of Gemini, Groq, and Hugging Face cover most needs.
  • Design: Figma (free tier, 3 projects). I don't design enough to need Pro.
  • PM: Notion free tier for personal notes. Obsidian for serious writing.
  • Communication: Slack free tier is enough for solo work. Discord for community.

The migration path

If you're starting from scratch, here's the order to add tools:

Week 1 — Bare minimum (~$15/month)

  • Cloudflare domain ($10/year)
  • Netlify free tier ($0)
  • Stripe ($0/month + fees)
  • GitHub free ($0)

Total: $15/year + transaction fees. Enough to ship a static site + payment link.