The $200/month stack that runs my entire micro-SaaS portfolio.
Six small products. Real users. Real revenue. The whole infrastructure bill comes to about $200/month, including the AI tools. Here's the line-by-line.
Six products. ~3,500 paying users combined. Total monthly infrastructure + tooling bill: $211. The split: 60% on Cloudflare (across 6 accounts), 30% on AI tooling (buildr Pro annual + AI gateway), 10% on the boring stuff (Stripe, Resend, domain renewals amortized). The full breakdown.
What I run
- 2 client retainers (apps I built and operate)
- 2 micro-SaaS of my own (~$1,200 MRR combined)
- 2 free OSS-adjacent tools that occasionally bring leads
The bill
| Service | What for | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Workers Paid (×6 accounts) | Required for Queues, Cron, DO across all apps | $30 |
| Cloudflare R2 / D1 (overages) | ~70 GB total stored across all 6 | $8 |
| Cloudflare WAF / Bot Mgmt (1 client) | One client demanded enterprise-style rules | $20 |
| buildr Pro (annual) | $140/yr ÷ 12, the chat agent across all 6 apps | $11.67 |
| OpenRouter credits | AI features inside the products | $45 |
| Stripe (no monthly, % of txn) | 2.9% + 30¢ — passthrough | $0 |
| Resend (transactional email, 50k/mo) | Onboarding, reset, receipts | $20 |
| Postmark backup (1 client requirement) | Cold standby for one client | $15 |
| Sentry (free tier blew past, paid) | Error monitoring across 6 apps | $26 |
| Domain renewals (12 domains, amortized) | Average $10/domain/year ÷ 12 | $10 |
| 1Password Business | Shared with one client team | $8 |
| Plausible Analytics (one site) | One client's marketing site | $9 |
| GitHub Pro | Private repos, CI minutes | $8 |
| Total | $210.67 |
What I refused to pay for
Every line in that table earned its spot. These are the recurring suggestions I keep declining:
- A "team" subscription on every tool. I'm a team of one. Pro/Solo plans exist for a reason.
- Vercel Pro for the marketing sites. Cloudflare Pages is free and faster.
- A dedicated CI vendor. GitHub Actions free minutes + a wrangler deploy is enough.
- An "all-in-one" observability platform at $200/mo. Sentry + Cloudflare logs + the agent's own digest covers it.
- Customer support tooling. A shared inbox in Fastmail and a Loom account. Done.
The math from the other side
Combined revenue from those 6 products: ~$36k/month (mostly retainers, partly MRR from my own products).
- Infrastructure: $211
- Stripe fees (~3%): ~$1,080
- Subcontractor (occasional designer): ~$800
- Total cost of revenue: ~$2,100
- Gross margin: ~94%
That margin is what makes the freelancer-with-portfolio model work. The 94% covers my time, my taxes, my health insurance, and the monthly steak. The infrastructure share is 0.6% of revenue. It is, frankly, a rounding error.
The only line on this list I'd resist if I were starting today is the redundant email vendor. Every other line earned its spot the hard way.
What I'd add at scale
If this portfolio doubles in size, here's what I'd add — and explicitly nothing else:
- A dedicated SSO provider when one client crosses 50 users (~$30-50/mo)
- A bookkeeping tool when revenue crosses $50k/mo (the accountant requires it)
- A second email vendor as primary for one specific high-volume product
That's it. The temptation at scale is to add tools. Resist. Most of what looks like an "ops problem" is a process problem in disguise.
Real production for $211/month, six products, ~3,500 users.
The trick is picking infrastructure where the floor is low and the ceiling is high. Cloudflare hits both. Everything else on this list is small, replaceable, and earns its spot.
Replace 6 dashboards with one chat.
buildr lives in the same chat across all your apps. Cloudflare-native, agent-operated, $140/yr Pro tier. The same line on this list.
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