Free-tier stack for a solo developer in India, 2026 edition

I run oriz.in for ₹0 per month. No hosting bill, no transactional email bill, no analytics bill, no monitoring bill. The site is small — about 18,000 monthly page views — but the stack scales further than that on the free tier alone. This post is the audit. Every service named here, I currently use or have used in the last six months. Every limit is a 2026 number, not a 2024 number repeated.

Why this matters more in India

Pricing pages are written in dollars. A "$20/month for the basics" SaaS bill is roughly ₹1,700 — and after GST and the FX markup on a foreign card it is closer to ₹2,000. That is a real cost when AdSense is paying you ₹40-200 per day. The math for an Indian indie hacker is different from the math for a US one. The free tiers were always good; in 2026 they are necessary.

Some services bill in INR (Razorpay, Zoho, MSG91, Cashfree). I noted those below. For everything else, the rule I keep: if the free tier covers my use case, I do not pay. If I outgrow the free tier, I evaluate the INR-billed alternative first.

Hosting and edge: Cloudflare

The whole stack starts with Cloudflare. I covered the Workers Static Assets vs Pages decision separately, but the relevant numbers:

Workers: 100,000 invocations/day free, unlimited static asset requests.
R2: 10 GB storage free, zero egress, 1M Class A operations/month.
D1: 5 GB storage, 5M row reads/day, 100K row writes/day.
Email Routing: free, unlimited forwarding aliases.
Web Analytics: free, no cookies, no consent banner needed.
Turnstile: free CAPTCHA, no per-solve fee.
Pages and Workers free plan: usable for commercial sites — no Vercel-style "hobby is non-commercial" restriction. I wrote about why this matters for AdSense sites.

DNS, SSL certificates, DDoS protection, and the global CDN are all included. The only paid Cloudflare product I would consider is Workers Paid ($5/month) once I cross 10M requests, which is far away.

100 subscribers free. Simple Markdown editor. RSS-to-email automation. Custom domain on the free tier (most competitors gate this). I picked Buttondown over ConvertKit/Substack because:

Substack takes 10% revenue share. Buttondown does not.
ConvertKit free tier caps at 1,000 subscribers but has aggressive upsells and the deliverability dashboard is locked behind paid.
MailerLite has a 1,000-subscriber free tier but the editor is heavier and the API is less pleasant.

When I cross 100 subscribers, Buttondown is $9/month for 1,000. I will pay that.

Forms: Web3Forms

250 form submissions/month free, no backend. I use it for the contact form and the AdSense feedback form. Submission data is delivered to my email — no dashboard, no database I have to maintain.

Alternative: Formspree (50/month free, more polished). Static Forms (100/month free). Web3Forms is the most generous free tier for the same feature set.

If I outgrow it, my migration plan is a Cloudflare Worker that posts to my own email via the Resend API (3,000 emails/month free with a domain).

Comments: Giscus

Free, backed by GitHub Discussions, no third-party hosting. Lazy-loaded below the fold so it does not cost Lighthouse points. Spam is essentially zero because GitHub auth filters out drive-by spam.

The catch: commenters need a GitHub account. For a developer-focused site like oriz.in this is fine. For a non-developer audience I would use Cusdis (free open-source) or Disqus (free with ads, but I am not putting their ads next to my AdSense ads).

Search: Pagefind

Static-site search built at build time. About 200KB of generated index for 1,800+ pages. No runtime service, no API key, no rate limits. Loaded only on /search. Replaces Algolia (free tier is 10k searches/month and gates analytics) and MeiliSearch self-hosted (requires a server I do not want to run).

Errors: Sentry Developer plan

5,000 events/month, 1 user, 30-day retention, unlimited projects. No card on file required.

I tracked errors with console.error and Cloudflare logs for the first month. Sentry is overkill for a static site, but the React 19 islands in the tools section sometimes throw at runtime and I want to know. Sentry's source map upload integrates with my Cloudflare deploy, so the stack traces resolve to readable React component names.

Uptime: UptimeRobot

50 monitors free, 5-minute check interval. I monitor /, /tools, /blog, /book-summaries, and a couple of the heavier tool routes. SMS alerts are paid; email alerts are free, which is what I use.

Alternative: BetterStack has a free tier (10 monitors, 3-minute interval, status page). Slightly nicer dashboard. UptimeRobot's API is more pleasant for the rare scripting I do.

Analytics: Cloudflare Web Analytics + Umami self-hosted

Cloudflare Web Analytics is the primary. Free, unmetered, no consent banner, server-side via Cloudflare so it does not cost any client-side JavaScript.

For events (form submissions, tool usage, AdSense impressions), I have a tiny Umami instance on a Cloudflare Worker + D1 setup. It is 80 lines of code and zero rupees. The full Umami self-host is heavier than I needed.

CI/CD: GitHub Actions

2,000 minutes/month free on private repos. oriz is private (I do not want every typo fix on the legal pages to be public history). My monthly usage is around 140 minutes — plenty of headroom.

The deploy job is wrangler deploy after pnpm build, with caching for node_modules via the standard actions/setup-node cache. Deploy time end-to-end is about 90 seconds.

Code hosting: GitHub Free

Unlimited private repos, 500MB Packages storage, 1GB LFS. The 500MB cap matters if you store images in git — I do not (OG images are pre-built and committed but they are AVIF and small; covers are external URLs).

Domain: ₹720/year for .in

This is the only line item I pay for. A .in domain at GoDaddy India or Namecheap is around ₹600-900/year depending on the renewal cycle. ₹720/year averaged out is ₹60/month — close enough to free that I do not count it.

Optional: Firebase Spark for v2

I am not using Firebase on oriz.in v1, but the v2 plan has Auth + Firestore + Storage. Spark plan limits as of 2026:

Auth: 50,000 MAUs free.
Firestore: 1 GB storage, 50K document reads/day, 20K writes/day.
Storage: 5 GB.

If I add user accounts and saved tool history, Firebase Spark covers it. The reason I did not use Firebase in v1 is that everything is static — there is nothing to authenticate against.

Indian-context notes

A few things specific to India that surprised me when I started:

PAN is required for any service that pays you (AdSense, Buttondown if you sell paid newsletters, etc.). Get it before you need it. I wrote about the full AdSense-side prep.
GST registration is not required below ₹20 lakh annual turnover. AdSense at indie scale is nowhere near that.
Foreign card transactions carry a 1% TCS as of 2024 and are subject to LRS. For my small bills (Buttondown at $9, hypothetically) this is negligible. For larger bills, the INR-billed alternatives matter.
UPI for INR-billed services: Razorpay, MSG91, Cashfree, and Hostinger India all accept UPI. Foreign-billed services do not.
DPDPA compliance for any user data. Cloudflare Web Analytics is no-cookie and DPDPA-friendly. Sentry stores user IPs by default — I disabled IP storage in the Sentry config.

Total monthly cost

Cloudflare: ₹0
Buttondown: ₹0 (100 subs cap)
Web3Forms: ₹0
Giscus: ₹0
Pagefind: ₹0 (build-time)
Sentry: ₹0
UptimeRobot: ₹0
GitHub: ₹0
Domain: ₹60/month equivalent

Operating cost: ₹60/month. AdSense at the very lowest indie scale should cover this 10x over. The free-tier-first approach is not a stunt — it is the only way the unit economics work.

I track every service I use in the dev tools section, and the pnpm 10 setup post covers the dependency layer underneath. The whole stack is boring on purpose.