Early-stage SaaS startups frequently overpay for cloud infrastructure by over-provisioning enterprise services before validating product-market fit. A typical high-reliability startup MVP architecture requires: 1) Two compute nodes (such as AWS t4g.medium or GCP e2-medium with 2vCPU / 8GB RAM) for high availability web serving (~$70–$90/month), 2) A managed relational database instance (AWS RDS PostgreSQL db.t4g.small or Cloud SQL) with automated daily snapshots (~$65–$80/month), 3) Object storage (Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage) for user file uploads ($0.023/GB/month), and 4) Network egress bandwidth (typically $0.08–$0.09/GB for external API responses). In total, a production-grade startup infrastructure budget typically averages $180 to $320 per month during the initial 10,000 user growth phase. Leveraging startup credits (AWS Activate, Google for Startups) can offset these costs entirely for the first 12 to 24 months.