AI SaaS Tool project cost estimator.

Lets users sign up and log in securely. Almost no SaaS ships without it, and rolling your own is the most common self-inflicted security hole. Every option below has a free tier that covers your MVP — pick one and move on.

Where your app's data lives — users, subscriptions, generated content. For AI products you want Postgres with pgvector so embeddings live next to your relational data instead of in a second vendor.

This is the cost category unique to AI products — and the one that surprises people. Tokens are metered like electricity: every request costs money forever. Start with the cheapest capable model and upgrade only when quality demands it.

Where your app runs and how it gets deployed. All four options below have a free path — differences show up in team pricing and bandwidth, which only matter after traction.

How money reaches you. Two fundamentally different models below: raw processors (Stripe) take less per transaction but leave sales tax compliance to you; merchants of record (Paddle, Lemon Squeezy) handle global VAT/sales tax for a bigger cut. If you sell worldwide as a solo founder, that difference matters more than the fee.

Only needed if you verify users by phone. Before paying here, know that email magic links (included with every auth provider above) solve onboarding for most SaaS products at zero extra cost. Phone verification mainly fights bots on public-facing apps.

For user uploads and generated files (PDFs, images, exports). The trap here isn't storage fees — it's egress (download) fees. Cloudflare R2 charges zero egress, which is why it anchors this list.

Tells you what users do (analytics) and when things break (error monitoring). Skip these and you're flying blind on both growth and bugs. All options below run meaningfully free until you have real traffic.