Claude Code's Choice of Vendors: The AI-Recommended SaaS Startup Stack
I asked Claude Code to recommend every service I need to run a SaaS startup. Not a vague "what's good these days" question—I gave it specific constraints: cost optimization (free tiers matter), developer experience (self-serve, no sales demos), and general quality (it just works).
Here's the exact prompt I used:
Please suggest all the services I need to run a SaaS startup. Only choose the best one of each. I'm interested in cost optimization (so cheap/free tier is great), and developer experience (e.g. good onboarding, self serve without going through a demo), and general quality (it just works).
I need to buy a domain name, have an AI agent help me build a CRUD app, deploy the web app somewhere, deploy the database somewhere (can be same or different from app), then all the good stuff like monitoring and logging, email sending and receiving (transactional and for humans), etc etc etc. Don't go too overboard, but you figure out what we'll need and create me a bill of materials of services I need to sign up for and how much it'll cost.
And here's what Claude Code recommended.
Core Infrastructure
| Category | Service | Free Tier | Paid Starting At | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Domain | Cloudflare Registrar | - | ~$10/year (.com) | At-cost pricing, no markup, excellent DNS included |
| AI Coding | Claude Code (Anthropic) | - | ~$20/month (API usage) | Best for building full apps, agentic coding |
| Web Hosting | Vercel | 100GB bandwidth, unlimited deploys | $20/month | Best DX, instant deploys, edge functions |
| Database | Supabase | 500MB, 50k MAU auth | $25/month | Postgres + Auth + Realtime + Storage in one |
| Auth | (included with Supabase) | ✓ | - | Skip Clerk/Auth0, Supabase handles this |
Operations
| Category | Service | Free Tier | Paid Starting At | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Error Tracking | Sentry | 5k errors/month | $26/month | Industry standard, excellent stack traces |
| Logging | Axiom | 500GB ingest/month | $25/month | Generous free tier, great query language |
| Uptime Monitoring | Better Stack | 10 monitors | $24/month | Clean UI, incident management included |
| Analytics | PostHog | 1M events/month | $0 (usage-based) | Product analytics + session replay + feature flags |
Communication
| Category | Service | Free Tier | Paid Starting At | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactional Email | Resend | 3k emails/month | $20/month | Modern API, built by Vercel alumni, React Email |
| Team Email | Google Workspace | - | $6/user/month | Calendar, Drive, Meet included |
| Customer Support | Crisp | 2 seats | $25/month | Live chat + helpdesk, way cheaper than Intercom |
Payments & Business
| Category | Service | Free Tier | Paid Starting At | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Payments | Stripe | ✓ | 2.9% + $0.30/txn | No monthly fee, best docs, Stripe Tax available |
| Billing/Subscriptions | Stripe Billing | ✓ | 0.5% on recurring | Customer portal, invoices, proration handled |
Monthly Cost Summary
Phase 1: Pre-Launch (Building)
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Domain (annualized) | ~$1/month |
| Claude Code API | ~$20/month |
| Everything else | $0 (free tiers) |
| Total | ~$21/month |
Phase 2: Launch (First Customers)
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Domain | ~$1/month |
| Vercel (Pro) | $20/month |
| Supabase (Pro) | $25/month |
| Google Workspace (1 user) | $6/month |
| Resend | $0 (free tier) |
| Sentry/Axiom/PostHog | $0 (free tiers) |
| Total | ~$52/month |
Phase 3: Growing (Scaling)
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| All Phase 2 | $52/month |
| Better Stack | $24/month |
| Crisp (paid) | $25/month |
| Additional Workspace seats | +$6/user |
| Total | ~$100-150/month |
Sign-Up Checklist
- Cloudflare - cloudflare.com (domain + DNS)
- Anthropic - console.anthropic.com (Claude API for Claude Code)
- Vercel - vercel.com
- Supabase - supabase.com
- Sentry - sentry.io
- Axiom - axiom.co
- PostHog - posthog.com
- Resend - resend.com
- Google Workspace - workspace.google.com
- Stripe - stripe.com
- Crisp - crisp.chat
- Better Stack - betterstack.com
All of these are self-serve with no sales demos required. You can sign up and start building immediately.
Why This Matters: The GEO Race Has Started
This is like the early days of SEO, but different.
In SEO's early days, you could game your way to the top of Google with keyword stuffing and link farms. Rankings were volatile. A competitor could knock you off position #1 next week with the right tricks.
AI recommendations don't work that way. When Claude Code tells developers to use Vercel for hosting or Supabase for their database, that recommendation is baked into a model trained on millions of examples of developers having good experiences with those tools. It's not reading a blog post ranking "Top 10 Hosting Providers"—it's synthesizing years of documentation quality, Stack Overflow answers, GitHub issues, and real-world usage patterns.
Changing an AI's recommendation takes longer than toppling a Google ranking. You can't buy your way in with ads. You can't game it with backlinks. The model has to genuinely learn, through extensive retraining on new data, that your product is the better choice.
For startups trying to win the GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) race, three things matter:
-
Excellent content. Your documentation, tutorials, and guides need to be genuinely helpful. AI models learn from this content. If developers consistently have good experiences following your docs, that signal propagates.
-
Smooth onboarding for humans and agents alike. Claude Code recommended these tools partly because they're self-serve. No demo required. No sales call. An AI agent can sign up, grab an API key, and start building. If your onboarding requires human intervention, you're invisible to agentic workflows.
-
Generous free tiers that allow small-scale production use. Notice how many of these recommendations have free tiers that aren't just "14-day trials." Supabase gives you 500MB and 50k monthly active users for free. That's enough to build and launch a real product. PostHog gives you 1M events. Axiom gives you 500GB of log ingestion. These companies understand that the path to paid customers runs through successful free users—and now, through AI agents recommending them to developers who trust those recommendations.
The companies on this list didn't end up here by accident. They've been building developer trust for years. The question for everyone else: are you building the kind of product that an AI would confidently recommend?