I spent €2,750 on tools and built €2M worth of software. Not €275,000. Not €27,500. Two thousand, seven hundred and fifty euros — less than most people spend on coffee in two years. With that stack I built 11 integrated products. Solo. No co-founder, no investors, no team. In 12 months.
If I'd gone the traditional route — hiring developers, designers, project managers — the bill would have been somewhere between €500,000 and €2,000,000. I know because I've spent years in this world and I've seen those invoices. Instead, I spent the equivalent of a decent laptop. Here is the exact stack, what each tool does in plain English, and the honest catch nobody puts in the screenshot.
The solopreneur tech stack, tool by tool
This is my actual monthly stack — the tools that built and run FIKR Space. The whole point is that you don't need a technical background to understand any of it:
| Tool | What it does (in plain English) | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Stores your data, handles user logins, keeps files — your product's back office | €25 |
| Vercel | Puts your product on the internet so anyone in the world can use it | €0–20 |
| Cursor | A writing tool for code — with AI built in that does most of the heavy lifting | €20 |
| Claude Pro | An AI thinking partner that helps you plan, write, and fix code through conversation | €20 |
| Domain + email | Your business address on the web (yourname.com) | €8 |
| Analytics | Shows you who's using your product and how | €0–10 |
| GitHub | Safely stores every version of your work — track changes for software | €0 |
| Total | ~€100–€230 |
That's it. That's the entire stack powering 11 products serving real users. No computer science degree required. No "technical co-founder" needed. If you want the canonical month-one budget for a single SaaS — line by line, against what the same product cost in 2020 — I've broken that down in how much it costs to build a SaaS. This post is the lived-in version: the real annual bill behind eleven products, not one.
What building software cost in 2019
Let me take you back. You had an idea for a software product — a tool that could solve a real problem you'd seen a hundred times at work. Here's what you needed to make it real:
- 3–5 developers: €150,000–€400,000 a year in salaries
- A designer: €50,000–€80,000 a year
- Cloud infrastructure setup: €2,000–€5,000 upfront
- Monthly hosting: €500–€2,000
- MVP timeline: 4–6 months minimum
- Total first-year cost: €200,000–€500,000+
And that's the minimum — cutting every corner, outsourcing and praying. If you weren't technical, the picture was even worse. You couldn't evaluate developers. You couldn't tell a good quote from a bad one. You were completely dependent on someone else to translate your vision into something real — and most of the time, that someone didn't understand your industry half as well as you did.
Most people with ideas never even started. The price tag killed the dream before anything was built.
The cost collapse: 2019 vs 2026
The tools aren't even the real story. The real story is what AI does to the gap between "I have an idea" and "people are using it." In 2019, building a single feature — say, a dashboard where your users can see their data in charts — took a team of two developers about 3–4 weeks. In 2026, I build the same feature in 2–3 days. Sometimes in a single afternoon. Average MVP development time has collapsed from 4.5 months to 3.2 weeks.
| What | 2019 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| MVP development | €50,000–€100,000 | €500–€5,000 | −95% to −99% |
| Monthly infrastructure | €500–€2,000 | €0–€100 | −95% to −100% |
| Time to MVP | 4–6 months | 3–6 weeks | −75% to −85% |
| Team required | 3–5 people | 1 person | −80% |
| First-year operating cost | €200,000+ | €3,000–€12,000 | −94% to −98% |
That's not a modest improvement. That's an entirely different economic reality — and it means the person with the best industry knowledge, not the best coding skills, now has the advantage.
The market already moved
According to Carta's 2025 Solo Founders Report, solo-founded startups have risen from 23.7% to 36.3% of all new startups since 2019. The reason isn't that founders got braver. The economics got possible. And here's the number that should make every corporate employee sit up: solo founders have 75% greater median ownership at exit than lead founders in multi-founder companies.
You keep more because you need less to start. No investors telling you what to build. No co-founder disagreements. No one between you and your vision.
What €2,750 doesn't buy you
I'd be lying if I said it was just about money. €2,750 buys you the tools. It doesn't buy you:
- The 1,000+ hours I spent learning, building, and shipping
- The evenings and weekends while still working a day job
- The mental stamina to push through when nothing works at 11pm on a Tuesday
- The product instinct to know what to build — where your years of industry experience become your unfair advantage
- The marketing skills to get anyone to actually care
The tools are cheaper than ever. The work is exactly as hard as it's always been. And cheap tools without direction produce expensive messes — that failure mode has a name: the vibe coding trap. The stack builds whatever you point it at, which is why validating the idea comes before the first prompt.
But here's what's different — and it matters if you've ever told yourself "I'm not technical enough." The barrier is no longer knowing how to code, having a computer science degree, or finding a developer who understands your vision. The barrier is now willpower. Consistency. Showing up and building when Netflix is right there. That's the most democratic thing that's ever happened in tech — because willpower doesn't require a trust fund, a technical co-founder, or anyone's permission. Every person who ever said "that's a great idea, but you'd need a developer for that" — the economics just proved them wrong.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a solopreneur tech stack cost in 2026?
Roughly €100–€230 a month. My full year running 11 products came to about €2,750 — Supabase for data and logins, Vercel for hosting, Cursor and Claude Pro for AI-assisted building, plus a domain, email, and analytics. GitHub is free.
Do I need to know how to code to use this stack?
No. Cursor and Claude do the technical heavy lifting — you describe what you want in plain English, review the result, and refine it. The skills that matter are product instinct, consistency, and knowing your industry's problems better than anyone else.
What would the same software cost with a traditional team?
In 2019 terms: €200,000–€500,000+ for the first year of a single MVP, before hosting. For everything I built, the conservative estimate is €500,000–€2,000,000 in development costs. The stack replaced that with €2,750 and my own time.
What does it cost to keep a SaaS running after launch?
Less than most people's coffee habit. I've published my full operating bill — including how costs scale from 100 users to 100,000 — in what it costs to run a SaaS solo.