How I run my SaaS for free as a student

Hello everyone!

I've been a lurker on Indie Hackers for over 2 years now, and I finally decided to start building since last month. I'm a final year computer science student from France, and as I was researching all the help that I could benefit, I managed to find a stack that cost $0 a month to run (for up to one year).

You should be eligible for this stack if you are a student, better if you have a .edu email too. It leverages the following resources:

Hereby I present to you 'The $0 student stack' that I use for my newly launched SaaS:

☁️ CMS: Webflow ($276 CMS plan yearly value)

With Webflow CMS plan, you can link to a custom domain, up to 2,000 CMS items (e.g: blog posts), and 1000 forms submissions per month

☁️ App hosting: Vercel (free plan)

My app is on a subdomain made using React Typescript & Vite.

📛 Domain: Name.com ($44.71 yearly domain name)

Now with the GitHub student pack, you don't get a .com TLD for free, but rather a .me, .tech, .live or some others. Personally, I used it for my domain orus.software, of which the .com was already registered.

I also get one month free trial of Titanmail to get a custom email domain. Not free if I want to continue with it.

📈 Analytics: SimpleAnalytics ($108 yearly value)

Simple Analytics student plan include one year of the starter plan, unlimited websites, and up to 100,000 page views per month. I also use the free plans from Nocodelytics that integrates with Webflow to track button clicks, and Hotjar for session recording and heatmap.

📧 Email marketing: Mailchimp (free plan)

🗣️ Customer support: Crisp (free plan)

Total value free for one year: $428.71

There's a ton of other resources that I haven't used from GitHub student pack yet, like a reduction on transaction fees from Stripe, free plans for Icons8 and IconScout for free illustrations and icons, etc...

SaaS doesn't cost much to run, but as I was unfamiliar with most tools, I decided to choose the free ones. Now obviously if you decide to pay for marketing it's not free, but the operational side should be completely free. I think it's perfect for students that are struggling financially to get started.

Some people pointed out that using these resources might break student license agreements, but after emailing the ones with a student plan, all of them confirmed that it can be used for commercial purposes. These are simply redeemed codes to upgrade your plan, and you get the same license as if you had paid for it.

Do you know any other resources that offer free student plans?