ARTICLE · ABOUT A 5-MINUTE READ
What the stack really costs
By Justin Ventola · 3 November 2026
Nobody puts the monthly bill in the video. Here is mine.
This is the complete list of tools behind the pages you have been visiting — the capture page, the four walkthrough pages, the emails, the tracker, this site — with what each one costs, which ones have a free tier, and, more usefully, when each bill should start. Because the first way beginners quietly go broke is not a scam. It is signing up for everything in week one and paying for five tools while they are still building page one.
The whole list
✓A domain name — about $12–15 a year. The one thing you cannot skip. Everything else can be swapped; the address is yours.
✓A mailbox on that domain — about $15 a year after a free trial month. Your emails have to come from your own domain or they land in spam (that is a whole article of its own). Not Gmail. Not optional.
✓A page builder — $0 to $97 a month. I use ClickFunnels, which is $97 a month after a 14-day trial and needs a card up front. The honest alternative is Systeme.io, which has a free plan with no card. Both do the job; the free one does it with fewer buttons.
✓An email tool — $0 to start, about $19 a month when the sequence goes live. GetResponse has a free plan that is enough to build your list and forms. The timed email run needs the Starter plan. Switch when the emails are written, not before.
✓A tracker — $0 until you have traffic, then about $79 a month. ClickMagick tells me which click came from which video. It is worth every dollar once people are clicking, and worth nothing the month before. Start the 14-day trial the day you publish your first traffic video.
✓The free shelf: Cloudflare for DNS and this site’s certificate, YouTube for hosting the walkthrough videos unlisted, Canva for thumbnails and the logo. $0, and they stay $0.
✓Checkout — $0 a month. Payhip takes a percentage of each sale and nothing when there are none. For a first product, that is exactly the deal you want.
Three honest totals
The floor: about $30 a year. Domain, mailbox, free page builder, free email plan, no tracker yet. Everything in the walkthrough can be built at this level. It is slower to use and it works.
The middle, which is what I run: about $116 a month — $97 for the page builder, $19 for the email tool — plus the yearly domain and mailbox. That buys speed and fewer workarounds, not better results.
The full stack, once traffic exists: about $195 a month. The middle plus the $79 tracker. You add it when there is something to measure.
The month each bill starts
✓Session 1 — foundations: both domains, the mailbox trial, Cloudflare, the page-builder trial, the free email plan. About $25 that month.
✓Day 15: the page-builder trial ends. $97 a month from here — or $0 if you chose Systeme.io.
✓Session 4 — the email run: email tool to Starter. Plus $19 a month.
✓First traffic video: tracker trial starts; it bills 14 days later. Plus $79 a month.
✓“Not until it hurts”: design tools, AI subscriptions, bigger plans, bundles. $0 — because you did not buy them.
That is the entire budget. If a course or a video tells you that you need more than this to start, it is selling you the more.
Two things to notice
It is less than one course. The programs I read the one-star reviews of ran from $27 to $2,500, and most of the complaints were about the second purchase inside the first. This whole stack, for a year at the middle level, costs about what one of those courses charges once — and you own every piece at the end.
It is more than zero. A domain and a mailbox are the price of being taken seriously by an inbox and by a reader. I have not found an honest way around that, and I stopped looking.
Prices checked on the vendors’ own pages in November 2026; they change, so confirm on the day you buy. Where I link to one of these tools on the Products page, it says right beside the link whether it is an affiliate link — a commission costs you nothing extra, and it is never why a tool is on this list.
Every click of this — which plan, which setting, the order to open them — is written down in Getting Started, the manual I built this site from. One price, a 60-day refund, nothing behind it.
Want the whole system in build order?
The free four-page walkthrough shows how an honest affiliate funnel is shaped, the one page that asks for an email, where the clicks leak, and the build plan — one short video a day for four days. Email only; unsubscribe any time.
The fine print
© 2026 No-BS Affiliate Marketing · Justin Ventola. Results are not guaranteed; nothing on this site is income, legal or tax advice. Where a link on this site is an affiliate link, it says so beside the link.