A Cheap, Self-Hosted SaaS Boilerplate, Fixed Cost Forever
Most SaaS starters are cheap to buy and expensive to run — the hosting bill climbs with success. This one is a £49 one-time PHP starter that runs on a $5 VPS at any scale you reach on a single box.
The real cost of a SaaS boilerplate is rarely the purchase price — it is what it costs to run month after month. A managed database, a serverless platform, a CDN and a queue each add a line to the bill, and most of them scale with your traffic. Simple Stack is built to be cheap to operate: plain PHP, a SQLite file, and SES for email all live on one small VPS. The £49 you pay once is most of what you will ever spend on the stack. How that £49 compares with the $199+ boilerplates — and the runtime subscriptions they assume — is on the one-time-payment page.
Where the cost goes
The whole stack on one box — no per-service bill.
A one-time purchase of the full source — no subscription, no per-seat license, no upgrade fee.
NGINX + PHP-FPM on a single small server runs the storefront, member app, admin and API together.
SQLite is a file on the same disk — nothing to provision, scale or pay for separately.
Transactional email over SES SMTP — fractions of a penny per message, no platform markup.
Cheap to buy and cheap to run
| Simple Stack | Typical hosted starter | |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront price | £49 once | Varies |
| Runs on a $5 VPS | ~ | |
| Managed database bill | × | ~ |
| Cost scales with traffic | × | ~ |
| Self-hosted, you own it | ~ | |
| Stripe billing built in |
Common questions
Yes — for a single-box app, PHP-FPM and SQLite in WAL mode handle real traffic. The full reasoning, and where you would eventually outgrow it, is on Ship a SaaS on a $5 VPS.
This storefront and every demo run on a small VPS.
Click through them, then ship your own — cheap to buy, cheap to run.