Online store: what to build it with and what it costs
Sell products online: a catalogue, a cart, checkout and order emails.
Sample PRD
- Product catalogue
- Cart and checkout
- Order confirmation emails
- Inventory
What it needs
- One-off payments: customers pay at checkout
- Merchant of record (handles sales tax / VAT) (nice to have): someone handles sales tax and VAT for you
- Transactional email: order confirmations and shipping emails
- Postgres: products, orders and stock
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: a percentage of every sale
- Order and shipping emails
- Hosting stays small until traffic is large
Lock-in
Saved cards and subscriptions are hard to move between payment processors; ask about card export before you choose.
Use this in Claude (with Kong Reviews connected at https://kongreviews.com/mcp)

