2.2 Storage, Costs, and Free Tiers

Time: ~30 minutes

What You'll Learn

• What each service in your stack charges for (and what is free)
• How to read a usage dashboard
• When free tiers run out and what happens
• How to keep costs near zero for a small business app

Key Concepts

One of the best things about building your own app is that running it can be free -- or very close to it. But "free" has limits, and you should understand them before you hit them.

What You Are Paying For

Every service in your stack charges for some combination of:

• Compute -- How much processing your app does (page loads, form submissions, database queries)
• Storage -- How much data you store (form submissions, uploaded files, database rows)
• Bandwidth -- How much data moves between your app and its users
• Invocations -- How many times your backend functions run

For a small business app with a handful of users, these numbers are tiny. Free tiers are designed for exactly this use case.

Typical Free Tier Limits

How to Check Your Usage

Each platform has a dashboard where you can see current usage:

• Vercel -- Settings > Usage
• Supabase -- Project Settings > Usage

Check these once a month. If you are under 20% of any limit, you are fine for a long time.

What Happens When You Exceed Free Tiers

Nothing catastrophic. Your app does not break immediately. You get warnings, then you either:

1. Upgrade to a paid plan (usually $5-25/month)
2. Optimize your app to use less (your AI can help)
3. Clean up old data you no longer need

How to Start

Tell your AI:

I want to understand the costs of running my app. My stack is:
- [Your framework] hosted on [your host]
- [Your database] for data
- [Any other services]

Walk me through:
1. What each service charges for
2. Where to check my current usage
3. What my realistic monthly cost will be with [estimate] users

What's Next

In lesson 2.3, you will learn to design your app so that real people can actually use it without asking you how it works.