--- title: "What Does My Tech Stack Cost? Build vs Buy Calculator" description: "Add the tools you pay for and see your whole stack priced both ways — total subscriptions against what building replacements would cost in hours, servers and maintenance." source: https://appstackbuilder.com/my-stack retrieved: 2026-08-24 --- Your whole stack # What does your tech stack actually cost to build instead of buy? Tell us what you pay for and we price all of it both ways — hours, servers and the maintenance that never stops — then tell you which tools are genuinely worth replacing and which ones you should keep paying for. A real paid SaaS stack to start from. Add your own tools and prices to make it yours. [Generate one instead](https://appstackbuilder.com/build-stack) Build vs Use 10 tools · 8 you could actually replace · 2 not buildable at any price ### Building this stack yourself never breaks even. Replacing all of it never pays back — but **1 tool is worth building on its own** at this rate. Stack decisions and tool decisions are not the same question. Use — subscriptions $565/mo across 8 replaceable tools Build — upfront $19,555 380 hours + $555 in AI spend Build — to keep running $1,034/mo $179 infra + 17.1 hrs upkeep Breakeven Never upkeep exceeds the subscriptions What your hour is worth $50 /hr $0 · nights & weekends$50 · senior dev$150 · agency You would pay a senior developer to build this. Upkeep Maintenance is the line everyone forgets. **17.1 hours a month** across this stack — patches, outages, an API that changed — costs **$855/mo** at your rate. That alone is more than the entire subscription bill. Cumulative cost · first 4 years Build itKeep paying #### Tool by tool 1 build · 0 depends · 9 keep paying ToolVerdictUse /moBuild upfrontRun /moBreakevenRemove Content Management Build $300 $2,315 $87 11 mo Building the editor is the easy half. Making it pleasant enough that non-engineers actually use it is the half that decides this. SEO Tools Keep paying $140 $3,600 $205 Never You can build the dashboard in a week. The crawl index and rank data behind it is the product, and buying that data costs more than the subscription. Monitoring & Observability Keep paying $26 $2,315 $110 Never Catching errors is trivial. Grouping them into one issue, applying source maps and not paging you twice at 3am is the product. Database Keep paying $25 $4,620 $245 Never Managed Postgres with backups, pooling and point-in-time recovery costs more in raw servers than the plan does. This one loses before a single hour is counted. Auth Keep paying $25 $3,090 $105 Never Sessions, SSO, MFA and every password-reset edge case are a permanent security surface. The build is tractable; staying current with it is what costs you. Hosting Keep paying $20 $1,290 $174 Never A VPS is cheaper than a platform right up until you rebuild CI, rollbacks and edge caching on top of it. Email/Messaging Keep paying $20 $1,035 $60 Never Sending is easy. Deliverability — warming IPs, DMARC alignment, staying off blocklists — is the actual product, and it decays quietly when unattended. Analytics Keep paying $9 $1,290 $48 Never A privacy-friendly pageview counter really is a table and a dashboard — one of the few analytics products small enough to own. All-in-One Development Keep paying usage — — — These bundle a frontier model with hosting and a build pipeline — replacing it means replacing all three. Payment Gateway Keep paying usage — — — Not a build decision at any price — card-network agreements, PCI scope and payout rails are contracts, not code. `breakeven = (hours × rate + AI spend) ÷ (subscription − infra − upkeep × rate)` Build estimates assume an experienced developer working with an AI coding assistant, building the slice of the product you actually use — not feature parity with the vendor. ## Why almost everything says “keep paying” Most build-vs-buy estimates count the build and stop there. The line that decides it is the one nobody writes down: the hours this thing takes every month, forever. ### The build is the cheap part An AI assistant genuinely does compress a two-week feature into a weekend. That moves the upfront number, which was never the number that mattered. ### Upkeep never stops One hour a month at $50/hr is $50/mo — already more than most plans cost. Two hours beats almost every subscription on the market, permanently. ### Sometimes the infra alone loses Managed Postgres or edge hosting can cost more in raw servers than the plan does. Those never break even at any hourly rate, including zero. The rule this produces Build the thin internal tools nobody outside your team ever sees. Buy the infrastructure your product sits on top of. Admin panels, feature flags, uptime checks and scheduling links are small, low-upkeep and invisible to customers — they clear the bar often. Databases, auth, email deliverability and payments are where a bad month costs you the whole product. [Browse every tool instead](https://appstackbuilder.com/)[Generate a stack from scratch](https://appstackbuilder.com/build-stack)