# The Pro Stack: the full payroll This is the org chart of a real production app. Every tool below is an employee: it has a job title in plain English and a salary. You are not supposed to hire all of them. You are supposed to understand what a scalable setup looks like, then start with three. One term first, because it explains the whole philosophy of this stack: a **CLI** (command-line interface) is the text-command version of an app, which matters because AI agents can type. If a tool has a CLI or an API (a way for programs to talk to it), a robot can operate it for you. Almost every hire below passed that interview question. ## The three ground-up rules 1. **Separate your marketing site from your app.** They have different jobs, different risk levels, and different hosting needs. When one breaks, the other keeps running. 2. **Own your code and your data from day one.** Your code lives in GitHub (a service that stores your project with full history), not only inside a builder tool. Your data lives somewhere you can export from. 3. **Prefer tools with a CLI or API.** If a robot can operate it, you can delegate it. Tools that only work through clicking are jobs you keep forever. ## Department 1: The Builders The people who write the product. ### Zed **Job:** the code editor, the desk where the human and the AI sit together. **Salary:** free. Pro is $10/mo, but bringing your own Claude plan works on the free tier. ### Claude + Claude Code **Job:** the senior engineer. Writes, edits, and debugs the actual code, in chat and in the terminal (the text window where you type commands to your computer). **Salary:** Claude Pro is $20/mo and includes Claude Code. Max plans start at $100/mo. ### GitHub **Job:** the filing cabinet with a memory. Stores every version of the code so nothing is ever lost and any mistake can be undone. **Salary:** free. The free tier is fine for a solo builder. ### The design system (a skill, not a subscription) **Job:** the art director. Instead of paying for design software, this stack uses a "design system from a screenshot" approach: show the AI a site you admire and it extracts the rules (colors, spacing, type) into one file your coding agent follows. **Salary:** $0. The full method is the [Design Heist Kit](https://robotsonpayroll.com/resources/design-heist-kit). ## Department 2: The Building The people who keep the product standing and running. ### AWS (via CLI) **Job:** the landlord. Hosts the app itself: the servers, the database, the heavy machinery. **Salary:** usage-based, typically $10-75/mo for a small app. **Gotcha:** the famous "12 months free" is gone. Since July 2025 the free tier is $200 in credits that expire after 6 months. Set a budget alert on day one. ### Cloudflare R2 + Images (via CLI) **Job:** the warehouse. Stores and serves images and files, with zero egress fees (egress fees are charges for data leaving the warehouse, and most warehouses charge them). **Salary:** 10GB free; typically $0-15/mo with image transforms. **Gotcha:** on the free plan, image transformations hard-fail at 5,001 uncached transforms. Not slow down. Fail. Watch that number if you serve lots of unique images. ### Vercel **Job:** hosts the marketing site only (see rule 1). Push code, site is live. **Salary:** Hobby is free; Pro is $20/mo and includes $20 of usage credit. **Gotcha:** the free Hobby tier is for non-commercial use only. A site for a revenue-generating app violates the terms. Also, Pro overages are uncapped by default: set a spend limit in the dashboard before you do anything else. ### Supabase **Job:** the quick-build contractor. Database plus login handling for small side projects, in minutes. **Salary:** free tier, then Pro at $25/mo. **Gotcha:** free-tier projects pause after 1 week of inactivity. Fine for experiments, wrong for anything users depend on. ### Trigger.dev **Job:** the night shift. Runs background jobs (work that happens without a user waiting on it, like processing uploads or sending scheduled emails). **Salary:** free $5 credit/mo; Hobby is $10/mo. A small app usually stays inside the free credit. ## Department 3: The Money ### Stripe **Job:** the cashier. Takes card payments and handles subscriptions. **Salary:** no monthly fee; 2.9% + $0.30 per US transaction. The Billing add-on for subscriptions adds 0.5-0.7%. ### Clerk **Job:** the doorman. Handles sign-ups, logins, and user accounts (auth, short for authentication: proving a user is who they say they are). **Salary:** free up to 50,000 monthly retained users (raised from 10K in February 2026); Pro is $25/mo. **Gotcha:** the recommendation from inside this stack: prefer Supabase auth instead, unless you are building B2B (selling to businesses, where Clerk's organization features earn their keep). Price is no longer the objection; needing the B2B features is. ## Department 4: The Megaphone The marketing department. Everything here runs through an API so robots can post, publish, and send. ### Meta + Google Ads (via API) **Job:** the ad buyers. Campaigns are created and adjusted programmatically instead of by clicking through dashboards. **Salary:** the ad spend is yours; API access is free. **Gotcha:** Google Ads API access requires a manager account and token approval, and reviews have had weeks-long backlogs in 2026. Apply before you need it. Meta's basic development-tier access is enough for managing your own account. ### Instagram (via API) **Job:** the social media intern that never sleeps. A custom tool publishes posts through the official API. **Salary:** free. **Gotcha:** requires a professional (business or creator) account, and every image must be at a public URL before posting. The official limit is 100 posts per 24 hours, but new accounts report real-world limits closer to 25-50. ### Outrank **Job:** the content writer. Auto-publishes SEO articles (SEO: search engine optimization, writing so Google sends you visitors). **Salary:** $99/mo for 30 auto-published articles. **Link:** https://outrank.so/?via=jonathan-jeffery ### Winnr **Job:** the outreach caller. Cold-email infrastructure for partnership and sponsor outreach. **Salary:** Startup plan is $69/mo for 50 mailboxes. **Link:** https://winnr.app/?ref=WIN-3EDE ### Resend **Job:** the mailroom. Sends marketing and product emails from your own domain. **Salary:** free for 3,000 emails/mo; Pro is $20/mo. **Gotcha:** the free tier also has a 100 emails per day cap, and that cap bites long before the monthly one. One decent launch day blows through it. ## Department 5: The Watchers The people who tell you what is happening. ### PostHog (via MCP) **Job:** the analyst. Tracks what users actually do in the app. Via MCP (Model Context Protocol, a standard that lets an AI use a tool directly), you can ask your analytics questions in plain English. **Salary:** free for 1M events/mo. ### GA4 + GTM **Job:** the traffic counter. Google Analytics 4 counts website visitors; Google Tag Manager manages the tracking snippets. Both can now be set up programmatically via API. **Salary:** free. ### Sentry (via CLI) **Job:** the smoke detector. Catches errors in production and reports exactly what broke and for whom. **Salary:** free Developer tier covers 5K errors/mo; Team is $26/mo. **Gotcha:** Slack alerts require the Team plan. The free tier watches; it does not shout. ### Slack **Job:** the intercom. Every alert, error, and progress report from the other robots lands in one channel. **Salary:** free tier is fine for alerts (incoming webhooks work; history is capped at 90 days). ## The takeaway Nineteen employees, most of them free or under $30/mo, every one of them operable by an AI agent. You do not need this payroll yet. You need three hires: something to build with, somewhere to own your code, and a way to get paid. That path is in `first-three-hires.md` in this kit.