BudgetForge

Tools & Insights

Calculators and money-honest breakdowns for founders who run the numbers.

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Stripe Effective Rate Calculator

See your blended processing rate across a real transaction mix, not just 2.9% + 30¢. Average ticket, international cards, ACH, and more. No signup.

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61 posts

tools

Lovable Pricing in 2026: What 100 Credits Really Cost You

As of July 2026, Lovable costs $0 (Free, 5 build credits/day up to 30 a month), $25/month (Pro, 100 credits), or $50/month (Business, the same 100 credits plus SSO and governance); Enterprise is volume-based. A credit buys a variable amount of work: 0.50 to 1.70 credits per action in Default Mode, or 1 credit per message in Plan Mode. That puts the effective rate around $0.25 per credit on Pro and $0.50 on Business. Budget by credits-per-feature, not the sticker.

8 min read648

Sentry Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay

Sentry pricing in 2026 is event-based: a free Developer plan, Team at $26/mo and Business at $80/mo (billed annually), each including 50,000 errors, 5M tracing spans, 50 replays and 5 GB of logs. Everything above that baseline is pay-as-you-go, and that overage, not the sticker, is your real bill. Errors run about $0.15 to $1.11 per 1,000 and spans about $1.60 to $4.00 per million, so tracing usually dominates. Below: the full per-unit ladder, three modeled 30-day bills, and why the Business plan includes the same base quotas as Team at three times the price.

8 min read398

Cloudflare R2 Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay

Cloudflare R2 pricing in 2026 charges for storage and operations but never for egress: Standard storage is $0.015/GB-month, Class A writes $4.50/million, Class B reads $0.36/million, with a permanent free tier of 10 GB plus 1M/10M operations. Free egress is the whole pitch, and it moves your bill onto operations, not gigabytes. Below: three real 30-day bills versus Amazon S3 and Backblaze B2, and the Infrequent Access trap that doubles a write-heavy bill.

17 min read1872
Infrastructure economics

Resend Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay

Resend pricing in 2026 runs from a permanent Free tier (3,000 emails per month, capped at 100 per day) to Pro at $20 per month for 50,000 emails or $35 for 100,000, then Scale from $90 up to $1,150 per month for 2.5 million emails, with $0.90 per 1,000 overage. The catch the pricing page hides: your real cost is the effective price per 1,000 emails, which swings from $0.40 to $3.33 on the same $20 plan depending on how full your tier is. Budget by the tier you actually fill, and watch the separate marketing-contacts meter.

8 min read696
Infrastructure economics

Firebase Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay

Firebase pricing in 2026 is free to start (Spark: 50K Firestore reads a day) then pay-as-you-go on Blaze at $0.06 per 100K reads, with no hard spending cap. New in 2026: Firestore now ships in two editions (Standard and Enterprise), SQL Connect adds a fixed floor from about $9.37/month, and App Hosting has its own bandwidth meter. Three real 30-day bills inside.

21 min read2393
Infrastructure economics

MongoDB Atlas Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay

MongoDB Atlas pricing in 2026 runs from a free 512 MB M0 cluster, to a usage-based Flex tier capped at $30/month, to dedicated clusters that start at $0.08/hour (about $58/month for an M10) and climb with RAM. The surprise is the jump from the $30 Flex cap to a dedicated cluster that bills 24/7 whether traffic flows or not.

8 min read696
Infrastructure economics

Clerk Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay Per User

Clerk's Free plan covers 50,000 monthly retained users (MRU) in 2026, so most side projects and early-stage SaaS pay $0. Pro is $25/month with 50,000 MRU included, then $0.02 per user in the 50,001 to 100,000 band. The bill that surprises teams is not per-user overage; it is the feature add-ons, B2B Auth at $100/month, Administration at $100/month, and extra Enterprise SSO connections at $75/month each. Clerk also bills retained users, not signups, so anyone who does not return 24 hours after signing up costs nothing.

7 min read452
Infrastructure economics

Twilio SMS Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay

Twilio charges $0.0083 per SMS segment in the US as of 2026, but that sticker price is not what lands on your bill. Carrier pass-through fees ($0.0035 to $0.005 per segment), A2P 10DLC registration charges, number rental, and multi-segment messages typically push the real delivered cost to $0.013 to $0.020 per message, roughly 1.7x to 2.5x the advertised $0.0083.

12 min read5325
Infrastructure economics

Stripe Fees in 2026: What You Actually Pay

Stripe's US rate in 2026 is 2.9% + $0.30 per online card charge with no monthly fee, but the flat 30-cent fee and five add-on meters (international +1.5%, currency conversion +1%, instant payouts 1.5%, disputes $15, Billing 0.7%) push most businesses to an effective 3.2% to 13%. Your real rate is a function of your average order value and how you get paid.

8 min read582
Infrastructure economics

Railway Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay

Railway pricing in 2026 is usage-based: you pay $20 per vCPU and $10 per GB of RAM per month, billed by the second, plus $0.05 per GB of egress and $0.15 per GB of volume storage. Hobby is $5 a month with $5 of usage included; Pro is $20 a month per workspace, not per seat, with unlimited seats and $20 of usage included. There is no permanent free tier, only a 30-day $5 trial, so a small always-on app runs about $5 to $22 a month and a modest production stack near $70.

10 min read2437