The Tech Stack I'd Run a Solo Business On in 2026
A recent roundup of solo founder setups put it bluntly: plenty of one-person businesses spend $200 to $500 a month on overlapping tools they barely use, per the Side Hustle Coalition breakdown. That is a car payment for software that mostly sits idle. An owner on r/Entrepreneur had the sharper version: "the trick isn't the tools, it's picking ones you won't abandon."
This is the stack I would actually run if I were starting a solo business tomorrow, line by line, with the real numbers.
Domain and hosting: about $10.46 a year, plus zero
A .com runs $10.46 a year at Cloudflare Registrar right now, the same price for registration and for renewal, per Cloudflare's registrar pricing table. Cloudflare sells domains at cost, with no markup on what the registry and ICANN charge, per Cloudflare.
The site itself costs nothing to host. I build static sites and deploy them to Cloudflare with a single command; Cloudflare's free tier covers a solo business site easily. I deploy brucepro.com exactly this way, every day the blog drips three new posts. If your site is a WordPress install you touch twice a year, you are paying monthly for a server you do not need. I wrote the full version of that argument here.
Email, docs, calendar: $7 a month
Google Workspace Business Starter is $7 per user per month on the annual plan, and every business plan now bundles Gemini, per SaaS CRM Review's 2026 pricing breakdown. One seat. Custom email on your domain, Drive, Calendar, Meet. This is the one subscription I never try to cheap out on, because your email is your business identity and Google's deliverability is better than anything you self-host.
Password manager: free
Bitwarden's free individual plan covers unlimited passwords across your devices. The password security post covers why this is non-negotiable, read it if you have not.
An AI assistant: about $20 a month
One frontier-model subscription, your pick. ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro both sit at $20 a month, per No Code MBA's pricing comparison. For a solo business this replaces a part-time researcher, a first-draft copywriter, and a rubber duck that never sleeps. If you only spend money on one thing in this list, spend it here.
Selling: $50 once
If you sell digital products, the subscription math is where most stacks quietly bleed. Gumroad takes 10% of every sale; I covered that arithmetic in the Gumroad post. LaunchPad is my own project and it is $50 once for the whole store, no fees, no monthly. Disclosure aside, the principle stands regardless of which tool you pick: for a solo business, per-sale percentages beat monthly fees only when your revenue is near zero, and then they punish you the moment you grow.
The math
$10.46 a year for the domain. $7 a month for Workspace. $20 a month for an AI assistant. Bitwarden free, hosting free, and LaunchPad $50 once. Call it $28 a month, $31 if you amortize the domain and the store. Other solo founders land in the same band: SoloStack's published 2026 stack runs 8 tools for $84 a month, and fewertools keeps a similar setup under $100 a month total.
The point is not the exact total. It is that every line item above has a job, a price you can name, and a reason it survived. Anything in your stack that fails that test is a candidate for the subscription audit.
What I left out
A CRM. If you are one person with a pipeline you can hold in your head, a CRM is a hobby, not a tool. The CRM post covers which ones are worth it when you outgrow that, read it when the spreadsheet stops working. I also skipped the bundled AI add-ons that staple $30 a month onto tools you already pay for. Your $20 standalone subscription does the same work without the lock-in.
And skip the all-in-one business suites that promise to replace twelve tools. They replace twelve tools with one tool you fight every morning. Small tools that do one thing well are cheaper to keep and easier to quit.
