When free tiers end: the user count where each part of a maker's stack starts to bill
Free tiers are measured in MAU, emails, gigabytes and events. Translated into users, they end in a clear order: hosting and email first, sign-in last — and some end with a jump.
Users before the first bill, for the tool makers’ products use most in each decision. Log scale.
Every free tier is generous in its own unit — 50,000 monthly active users, 3,000 emails, 500 MB, 5,000 errors — which makes them hard to compare and easy to misjudge. This guide puts them in one unit: users of your product. Each vendor's own price list, the usage behind a typical product at each size (below), and the question: at how many users does the first real bill arrive?
The order the bills arrive in
The chart above takes the tool makers' products use most in each decision — Vercel, SendGrid, Supabase, Sentry, Clerk — and asks how many users each carries before the first bill.
Sign-in is the last to bill: every hosted sign-in service we price is free to at least 25,000 monthly users. Email and error monitoring end far sooner: the median free email plan at about 600 users, sending five emails a user a month, and Sentry's at about 1,000.
Most first bills are tens of dollars. Auth0's isn't: its free plan covers 25,000 users and has no small step after it — Essentials is sold in blocks of users, all of them paid, so the month you pass the free plan's limit costs $1,768.
Hosting is the surprise: 7 of the 8 hosts we price bill a product that makes money from its first day. Vercel's free Hobby plan is for personal, non-commercial use only, so a commercial product pays $20 a month on Pro from launch. The rest bill for an always-on server, seats or deploys rather than traffic.
Every option, decision by decision
The most used tool isn't always the one that stays free longest. Within each decision, the furthest free first, and what the first bill is:
Better Authalways free
“Free” means under a dollar a month: pay-as-you-go services that cost cents at launch count as free until their bill passes $1. Log scale.
Where the most used option isn't the furthest free, another goes further: Cloudflare for hosting, Amazon SES for transactional email, Turso for database and WorkOS for authentication. The trade is usually setup or lock-in rather than money — each decision's calculator has the full price at your usage.
A common stack, as it grows
The most used tool in each decision together — Vercel, Supabase, Clerk, SendGrid, Sentry — on their cheapest plan for a product that charges money:
| 100 users | 1,000 users | 10,000 users | 100,000 users | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel | $20 | $20 | $40 | $127 |
| Supabase | $0 | $25 | $25 | $53 |
| Clerk | $0 | $0 | $0 | $1,025 |
| SendGrid | $20 | $20 | $20 | $499 |
| Sentry | $0 | $0 | $29 | $135 |
| Each month | $40 | $65 | $114 | $1,838 |
Payments aren't in it: Stripe and merchants of record take a share of revenue, not a monthly fee (see how makers take payments). Model APIs aren't either: they bill from the first token. Check your stack runs this for your own tools.
What “users” means here
Users turn into usage the way Plan your stack prices its sizes. At 1,000 users:
| Decision | Usage a month |
|---|---|
| Hosting | requests 500k requests, data transfer out 10 GB, serverless function compute 10 GB-hours |
| Database | database size 1 GB, data transfer 10 GB, document or row reads 1 million reads, document or row writes 200k writes |
| Authentication | monthly active users 1k MAU |
| Transactional Email | emails 5k emails |
| Error Monitoring | errors 5k events |
| File Storage | stored 10 GB, downloaded 20 GB |
| Background Jobs & Cron | job runs or steps 10k runs, job compute time 5 hours |
Usage between the sizes we price (1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 users) is read on a log scale; below 1,000 it scales down in proportion. Seats and always-on servers stay at one developer and one server. Your product may send ten times the email or store a tenth of the files: the calculators take your own numbers.
List prices from each vendor's pricing page, checked as shown on its calculator; yearly discounts, startup credits and taxes left out.