Ship a Real SaaS on a $5 VPS
Managed Postgres, serverless and CDNs all bill you for scale you may not have yet. A single small VPS genuinely runs a paying SaaS. Here is why, and where the limits really are.
Why SQLite + PHP-FPM is enough
The instinct that "SQLite cannot scale" usually means "SQLite cannot scale to many writer machines" — which is true and irrelevant on a single box. With WAL mode, SQLite handles concurrent readers alongside writers comfortably, and PHP-FPM serves requests without a separate application server. No database server to run, patch or pay for. For most B2B and indie SaaS workloads, the bottleneck is never SQLite.
The whole stack on one box
A standard, boring, well-understood web tier that any host supports.
Your database is a file on the same disk — backed up with a copy, restored just as easily.
Billing events arrive over HTTPS and update local state — no queue or worker required.
Transactional email over SMTP, so login links and receipts just work.
When you would outgrow it
Honesty builds trust, so: you would move off a single box when you need horizontal write scaling across machines, multi-region low latency, or a team that wants managed-database guarantees. Most products never reach that, and the ones that do can migrate the data layer later — by which point you have paying customers funding the move. Until then, a fixed-cost VPS is the cheapest way to run a SaaS.
This storefront and every demo run on this exact code.
Click through them, then ship your own on a small VPS.