The flagship guide
Free tiers, assembled
$0/mo in fixed software subscriptions at launch scale (excludes domain registration and per-transaction payment processing fees) — as checked November 9, 2026
That sentence is the entire claim, with its edges showing. This page assembles the vetted catalogue's free tiers into one launch stack and names, for each layer, the wall where free ends. It adds nothing up: the moment a wall arrives, the question stops being about tools and becomes a budget question — and budgets live at businesslaunchstack.com, which models the post-wall spend properly.
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01 · Hosting — Cloudflare
Run by this estate Direct link — no affiliate relationship
Free at launch scale: Pages serves static sites with unlimited requests; Workers free carries 100,000 function requests a day. The wall: dynamic volume past the daily allowance — Workers Paid, $5/mo, is the first paid step. The hosting record.
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02 · Payments — Stripe
Run by this estate Direct link — no affiliate relationship
Free to hold: no monthly fee, no setup fee — an idle account costs nothing. The honest edge: when money moves, the per-transaction fee (2.9% + 30¢ per successful US card charge) applies from the first sale. That fee is excluded from this page's framing sentence, by name, because it is not a subscription. The payments record.
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03 · Email — Resend
Run by this estate Direct link — no affiliate relationship
Free at launch scale: 3,000 emails a month. The wall: 100 sends a day — a launch-day burst reaches it first. Pro ($20/mo, 50,000 emails) lifts the daily cap. The mailbox half of the layer is not in this assembly: Google Workspace has no free tier, and this guide does not pretend otherwise. The email record.
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04 · CRM & audience — EspoCRM
Evaluated · Nov 9, 2026 Direct link — no affiliate relationship
Free at launch scale: the self-hosted core is free software with no per-user fee and no seat or record cap. The wall: automation — workflows and advanced reports — is a paid extension pack, and the hosting is yours to run and patch. The CRM record.
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05 · Analytics — Google Analytics 4
Run by this estate Direct link — no affiliate relationship
Free at launch scale, full stop. The wall: data retention capped at 14 months on free properties, and enterprise pricing far beyond launch scale. The analytics record.
What this page refuses to do
It does not add the layers into a monthly figure, because two of them are not monthly figures at all — one is per-transaction, one is per-seat — and a sum built from different kinds of price is a small lie. For the honest version of that arithmetic, use the budget worksheet at businesslaunchstack.com. And if the question underneath is not “what do I launch on?” but “am I ready to launch?”, that is scored — not listed — at masterlaunchstack.com.