$0 to start6 services· 6 auto-onboard

$0 API Backend

Technical devs building an API product or backend service

Container hosting + edge SQLite + serverless Redis — always-on, $0 to start

For when your product is an API (not a web app with a UI). Fly.io runs always-on containers globally. Turso gives you SQLite at the edge with read replicas in every region (faster than a single-region Postgres for API-heavy workloads). Upstash provides serverless Redis for caching, rate limiting, and queues. Sentry catches errors. All free to start, all scale independently when you need them to.

What's in the box

Every service has a transparent affiliate disclosure. Most have none.

GitHub

✓ wizard

Source control, CI

Free tier: Unlimited private repos
No affiliate — SPARKi earns nothing here

Fly.io

✓ wizard

Always-on container hosting with global distribution

Free tier: 3 shared-cpu-1x VMs (256MB each), 160 GB outbound, 3 GB persistent volumes
No affiliate — SPARKi earns nothing here
When to upgrade: Need more VMs, larger RAM, or paid volumes → Fly Launch (pay-as-you-go, ~$1.94/mo per shared-cpu-1x) ↗

Turso

✓ wizard

Edge SQLite with global read replicas

Free tier: 500 databases, 9 GB storage, 500M row reads/mo, 10M row writes/mo, 6 locations
No affiliate — SPARKi earns nothing here
When to upgrade: Exceed 9 GB storage or 500M reads → Turso Scaler ($29/mo for 24 GB, 1B reads) ↗

Upstash Redis

✓ wizard

Serverless Redis for caching, rate limiting, queues

Free tier: 10,000 commands/day, 256 MB storage, 1 DB
No affiliate — SPARKi earns nothing here
When to upgrade: Commands > 10K/day → Upstash Pro (pay-as-you-go from $0.2/100K commands) ↗

Sentry

✓ wizard

Error tracking for API requests and background jobs

Free tier: 5,000 errors/mo
No affiliate — SPARKi earns nothing here

Pico

✓ wizard

Uptime monitoring — ping your API health endpoint

Free tier: Free — SPARKi's sister project
No affiliate — Pico is SPARKi's own tool

How to set it up

6 of 6 services are onboarded automatically by SPARKi's wizard. The rest you set up by following the steps below.

  1. 1Create accounts on GitHub, Fly.io, Turso, Upstash, Sentry
  2. 2Copy tokens to .env: GITHUB_TOKEN, FLY_API_TOKEN, TURSO_DATABASE, TURSO_ORG, UPSTASH_*_EMAIL and UPSTASH_*_API_KEY
  3. 3flyctl launch your app to deploy initial Fly machine
  4. 4Add providers block to sparky.config.yaml
  5. 5Add a Pico monitor pointing at your API's /health endpoint
  6. 6Restart SPARKi: pm2 restart sparky --update-env
  7. 7Verify: /sparki packages setup api-backend

Ready? SPARKi can onboard most of this for you.

Open SPARKi and run /sparki start api-backendfor <your-project> in a direct message. SPARKi will walk you through 6 services one at a time, verify each API key live, and write the config automatically.

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