Cloud bills can quietly eat your runway. Here's the stack we recommend for African startups under 100k MAU.
The minimum viable cloud
Frontend: Vercel (free tier covers most early apps), Cloudflare in front for DDoS + caching.
API + DB: Supabase. PostgreSQL + auth + storage in one place, under $25/mo until you're real.
Workers/queues: Cloudflare Workers + Queues. Pay per request. No idle cost.
Email: Resend or self-hosted Nodemailer over a $5/mo SMTP relay.
File storage: Cloudflare R2 (no egress fees) or Supabase Storage.
Total monthly cost at 10k users: under $100. At 100k users: under $1000.
When to move
Once you have product-market fit and your bill crosses $2k/mo, start the AWS conversation. Until then, every minute spent on infra is a minute not spent on product.
