6 Must-Have Services Every Product Needs – With Generous Free Tiers
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Whether you're building a new product from scratch or using AI to rapidly prototype and iterate, leveraging proven services can save time and reduce costs. Here are 6 standout tools we rely on at MarketLens—our platform for advanced financial market visualizations—and strongly recommend. Their generous free tiers let you launch and scale without upfront expenses, while paid plans remain affordable.
Sentry helps us catch, triage, and fix errors across our backend and frontend. Originally focused on error tracking, it has grown to include performance tracing and release health monitoring. The clean, intuitive interface avoids unnecessary complexity.
Compared to heavier tools like Datadog, Sentry provides fewer features but delivers developer-friendly pricing. The free plan includes 5,000 errors and 5 million spans per month—plenty for early-stage projects. It integrates seamlessly with most languages and frameworks (our favorites are Rust and JavaScript).
PostHog powers our user behavior insights at MarketLens, from key metrics to session replays that reveal how users navigate the platform.
As an open-core platform (core features open-source under MIT), it delivers event tracking, funnels, A/B testing, and heatmaps in one privacy-focused package—making it a strong alternative to Mixpanel or Amplitude.
The free tier is very generous: up to 1 million events per month, unlimited team members and tracked users, and 5,000 session recordings. This makes it ideal for bootstrapped projects. Paid plans scale reasonably with usage. Setup is fast with web auto-capture, and the open-source core supports full self-hosting for data control and compliance.
A nice bonus: no aggressive sales pressure—you never need to join a call.
BetterStack focuses on infrastructure observability, offering uptime monitoring, incident alerts, metrics dashboards, and logs to help identify bottlenecks early.
Its free plan stands out with 2 billion metrics retained for 30 days, 3 GB logs (3 days), 3 GB warehouse events (30 days), 10 uptime monitors & heartbeats, 100,000 exceptions per month, and 1 status page. This is sufficient for personal projects or early-stage teams. Compared to pricier options like New Relic, it offers a more focused and affordable observability experience.
Supabase is an open-source Firebase alternative built on Postgres. It provides a managed database with built-in authentication, real-time subscriptions, and file storage—perfect for rapid prototyping. We use it at MarketLens for user data and smaller datasets.
The free tier offers 500 MB database space, unlimited API requests, and authentication for up to 50,000 monthly active users—excellent for MVPs and side projects. Pricing scales affordably. SDKs support major frameworks, and you can self-host it for free on your own infrastructure.
Hashnode handles our documentation and blog. Designed for developers, it supports Markdown, custom domains, newsletters, SEO tools, and built-in analytics—giving you more control than Medium.
The free plan includes unlimited posts, custom domains, and analytics, with no ads or forced upgrades. GitHub and RSS integrations simplify publishing, helping you build an audience around your project. Content remains fully yours with easy export options.
Plane.so streamlines our workflows as an open-source alternative to Jira or Linear. It supports tasks, epics, cycles, dependencies, custom states, a built-in wiki, AI-powered search across projects, and easy imports from Jira, Linear, ClickUp, or Asana.
The Community Edition (AGPL v3) is free to self-host and includes the same features as Plane’s Cloud Free tier. Cloud plans include a Free tier, with paid plans starting at $6 per seat/month for additional capabilities such as SSO, advanced analytics, and higher limits. A paid Commercial license is required for full-featured self-hosting to match paid cloud plans. This flexibility helps teams of any size stay organized without high vendor lock-in.
These tools have helped us move faster at MarketLens while keeping costs low. Which ones are you already using or planning to try?
