Scheduling and booking: what to build it with and what it costs
Customers book a time, pay, and get reminders; the business sees its calendar.
Sample PRD
- Availability and calendar
- Booking page
- Payments at booking
- Email reminders
What it needs
- One-off payments: take payment when someone books
- Transactional email: confirmations and reminders
- Google sign-in (nice to have): sign in with Google to sync calendars
- Postgres: bookings and availability
MVP: about 100 users, $0/mo
Someone with an idea or a solo founder. Built with an AI app builder: describe it and it builds and hosts it.
| What | Pick | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| AI coding agent | Base44 Starter | $16 |
| Mailgun Free | $0 | |
| Payments | Stripe Standard (US cards) | $43.80 |
| Analytics & errors | PostHog Free | $0 |
First cost jump: Mailgun: Free limits reached, upgrade to Basic
Growth: about 10,000 users, $23.05/mo
A funded team or one with traction. Built with an AI coding agent for each of about 3 developers.
- Error tracking: know when something breaks
- Daily backups: daily backups once real people depend on it
| What | Pick | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| AI coding agent | Augment Code Standard | $20 |
| Hosting | Heroku Basic dyno | $7 |
| Database | Neon Launch | $1.05 |
| Sign-in | Auth0 Free | $0 |
| Amazon SES A la carte | $15 | |
| Payments | Stripe Standard (US cards) | $4,380 |
| Analytics & errors | PostHog Pay as you go | $0 |
First cost jump: Auth0: Free limits reached, upgrade to B2C Essentials
Scale: about 100,000 users, $260.64/mo
An established product. Built with an AI coding agent with team billing and admin for about 10 developers.
- Error tracking: know when something breaks
- Daily backups: daily backups
- Point-in-time recovery: restore to any minute after a bad deploy
- Multi-factor authentication: two-factor sign-in for accounts worth stealing
| What | Pick | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| AI coding agent | Augment Code Standard | $20 |
| Hosting | Fly.io Machine, shared-cpu-1x with 256MB RAM | $62.19 |
| Database | DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL Single node (1 vCPU, 1 GiB RAM, 10 GiB disk) | $19.45 |
| Sign-in | WorkOS AuthKit | $0 |
| Amazon SES A la carte | $150 | |
| Payments | Stripe Standard (US cards) | $43,800 |
| Analytics & errors | Sentry Team | $29 |
First cost jump: DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL: Single node (1 vCPU, 1 GiB RAM, 10 GiB disk) limits reached, upgrade to Single node (1 vCPU, 2 GiB RAM, 30 GiB disk)
What drives the cost
- Payment fees per booking
- Reminder emails (and SMS, not priced here)
- Calendar sync APIs are free at small scale
Lock-in
Low: bookings are simple data. Payment customers are the stickiest part.
Use this in Claude (with Kong Reviews connected at https://kongreviews.com/mcp)

