2.2 Storage, Costs, and Free Tiers
What you're paying for and how to stretch free tiers.
The Cost of Running an App
Your app is not free to run. Someone is paying for the server, the database, and the domain name. The good news: for a small tutoring practice, free tiers are more than enough.
Where the Costs Are
| Service | Free Tier | When You Pay |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel (hosting) | 100 GB bandwidth/month, unlimited deploys | If you get thousands of visitors per day |
| Supabase (database) | 500 MB storage, 50K monthly active users | If you store large files or have massive traffic |
| GitHub (code storage) | Unlimited public/private repos | Probably never for this use case |
| Domain name | None (use .vercel.app for free) | $10-15/year for a custom domain |
What Uses Storage
- Each intake form submission is a few kilobytes of text
- Session logs are similarly small
- At 500 MB free on Supabase, you could store hundreds of thousands of submissions
You are not going to hit these limits with a tutoring practice.
What Uses Bandwidth
- Every time someone loads your intake form, that is bandwidth
- The form page is small — a few hundred kilobytes at most
- At 100 GB free on Vercel, you could serve the form to tens of thousands of visitors per month
Staying Free
- Do not store images or files in your database — use a file storage service if you need that later
- Do not add analytics that phone home to expensive services
- Keep your app simple — the smaller the page, the less bandwidth it uses
When to Pay
If your tutoring practice grows to the point where you are hitting free tier limits, that is a good problem. It means your tool is working. At that point, paid tiers are typically $5-20/month.
Next: 2.3 Designing for Your User — making your form work for the people who actually use it.