Side project launch kit

By AppDuo Editorial Team · Updated Nov 11, 2026

Six tools for six jobs in getting a small web or mobile project online: AI UI generation, front-end hosting, backend and database, edge functions, error monitoring and mobile builds. All six have a free tier to start on, but each meters usage differently, so check what happens past the limits: Netlify pauses sites when credits run out, while Cloudflare Workers has no hard spending cap. Pick the steps you need; this is not a bundled purchase and it does not assume the products integrate with each other.

For: Solo developers and small teams launching a side project
Typical cost: Costs are not added up: each tool bills differently (AI credits, credits, compute, requests and CPU time, error events, builds) and the first paid plans are for different audiences. All six have a free tier. First paid steps from each vendor's USD pricing: for individuals, Netlify Personal at $9/month and Expo Starter at $19/month plus usage; Cloudflare Workers Paid at a $5/month minimum per account, with usage beyond the included amounts metered; for teams, Render Pro at $25/month per workspace (plus compute), Sentry Team at $29/month and v0 Plus at $30 per user per month. v0's personal Premium plan is closed to new users, and Render Hobby has no workspace fee but still bills compute.

1. v0 – AI UI generation
Vercel's AI agent builds web apps and UIs from a prompt, syncs code with GitHub and deploys to Vercel; it produces web code, not native apps. Free gives 7 messages a day plus a one-time $5 credit. Trade-off: The personal Premium plan ($20/month) is being sunset and closed to new users, so the next step is Plus at $30 per user per month for teams. Since May 2025 v0 bills in credits, and many Vercel forum users say credits drain fast and are charged even for AI mistakes; Vercel has not confirmed these reports and said it would not revert the change. Vercel's April 2026 bulletin on internal systems accessed via a third-party AI tool was closed with remediation complete; it does not mention v0, but anyone deploying to Vercel should review environment variables and API keys in their projects
Read our full v0 review
6.8/10
2. Netlify – Front-end hosting and deploys
Deploys static and front-end sites from Git, the CLI, drag-and-drop or an AI agent, with a preview URL for every pull request. Free includes 300 credits a month; Personal is $9/month for 1,000 credits. Trade-off: When credits run out, every project on the team pauses until the next cycle and visitors see a "Site not available" page; since 14 Apr 2026 bandwidth costs 20 credits/GB instead of 10. Credit plans pause projects instead of billing overage (auto recharge is off by default); the $104,500 bandwidth invoice a site owner reported after a 2024 DDoS was on a legacy plan, and Netlify's CEO said the user would not be charged
Read our full Netlify review
7.3/10
3. Render – Backend services and database
Runs web services, workers, cron jobs, Postgres and Key Value on one platform, deployed from Git. Hobby has a $0 workspace fee plus compute, with 750 free instance hours a month per workspace; Pro is $25/month per workspace for teams. Trade-off: Free web services spin down after 15 minutes without traffic and take about a minute to restart, and free Postgres expires after 30 days. Render's own postmortem says a faulty change restarted all customer workloads on 26 March 2024, with free services back only at 20:00 UTC; Render states no data was lost
Read our full Render review
7.0/10
4. Cloudflare Workers – Edge functions
Runs JavaScript, TypeScript or Python on Cloudflare's network, billed on CPU time with no egress fees, alongside R2, D1 and KV. Free covers 100,000 requests a day at 10 ms CPU per request; past that, Cloudflare returns an error or bypasses the Worker depending on configuration, and nothing is billed; Paid starts at a $5/month minimum per account, including 10M requests. Trade-off: There is no hard spending cap, and budget alerts are informational only. Per ppc.land, a developer self-reported a bill of about $36,000 in one month and attributed it to bugs in their own code; the figures are unverified. Two 2025 outages (12 June and 18 November) disrupted Workers KV
Read our full Cloudflare Workers review
7.5/10
5. Sentry – Error monitoring
Aggregates errors and performance data from web, mobile and games, with official docs for many programming languages. The free Developer plan covers 1 user with 5k errors, 5M spans and 50 replays a month. Trade-off: The first paid plan is Team at $29/month ($26/month billed yearly) for teams, with spend caps; error events above quota are billed pay-as-you-go, but the pricing page lists no rate. Per Sentry, a 6 May 2022 outage took services down for 6+ hours and lost roughly 90% of incoming events over eight hours
Read our full Sentry review
7.3/10
6. Expo – Mobile app builds and releases
An open-source (MIT) React Native framework with cloud services to build, submit to the App Store and Google Play, and ship over-the-air updates. Free includes 15 Android and 15 iOS builds a month with no overage charges; Starter is $19/month plus usage. Trade-off: Expo is built around React Native, not pure Swift/Kotlin or Flutter, and on paid plans iOS builds beyond the allowance cost from $2 each. In 2024 Expo fixed a command-injection flaw in EAS Submit; it said it found no evidence of exploitation but could not fully rule it out, and recommended revoking and recreating App Store Connect API keys
Read our full Expo review
7.7/10