Developer Stack Library
Start from what you're building
Each track covers one common kind of build: what it optimises for, what it costs you, and where it stops being the right choice.
Solo SaaS
A product one person can ship and keep running without a platform team. Optimises for the smallest number of moving parts you can still grow on.
- For:
- One founder or a very small team, running it themselves
- Shape:
- Managed everything, few services, boring where it counts
Fast MVP
Guide coming nextGet something real in front of users quickly, accepting specific debt on purpose and knowing which parts you'd replace first.
- For:
- Validating an idea before committing to a full build
- Shape:
- Speed over flexibility, with a documented exit from each shortcut
AI Application
Guide coming nextAnything with a model in the request path. The hard parts are streaming, cost control, and knowing whether output quality is getting better or worse.
- For:
- Products where a model does real work, not a chat bolt-on
- Shape:
- Provider layer, background jobs, evaluation and observability
Marketing Website
Guide coming nextA site that has to load fast, rank, and stay editable by whoever actually owns it two years from now.
- For:
- Businesses whose site is a channel, not a product
- Shape:
- Static-first, content workflow decided up front
What every stack guide has to answer
Published so you can check the work. A guide that skips these isn't a comparison, it's a preference.
- Development speed
- How quickly a competent team gets to something real and deployed.
- Maintenance burden
- What breaks on its own, and who has to be awake when it does.
- Infrastructure complexity
- How many separate services exist, and how many you operate yourself.
- Cost at small scale
- What it costs at low traffic, and where the first real bill appears.
- Scaling path
- What you change first if it works, and whether that is a rewrite.
- Ecosystem maturity
- Whether answers exist when something goes wrong at 2am.
- Authentication
- Accounts, sessions, and permissions — build, buy, or inherit.
- Database & data layer
- Where state lives, how it is queried, and how it is migrated.
- Deployment
- How code reaches production, and how quickly it can be reversed.
- Observability
- Whether you find out from your monitoring or from a customer.
- Payments & email
- Where money and transactional email fit, when the build needs them.
- Lock-in & portability
- What it costs to leave, and which pieces are genuinely replaceable.
The choices that recur across every stack
Some decisions come up whatever you're building. These get their own comparisons rather than being re-argued in each guide — none are published yet, so this is what the library will cover.
Postgres, Supabase, or Neon
PlannedManaged Postgres options, and what you give up choosing each.
Authentication options
PlannedHosted auth against rolling your own, and the migration cost between them.
Hosting choices
PlannedPlatform hosting, containers, and where the boundary actually sits.
Email infrastructure
PlannedTransactional delivery, deliverability, and why it stops working.
Monitoring & analytics
PlannedError tracking and product analytics without instrumenting everything twice.
Payments
PlannedSubscriptions, one-off charges, and the parts that are never just a checkout.
An interactive Stack Builder
A short set of questions — what you're building, team size, how fast you need to launch — that points at one of the tracks above. It isn't built yet, and there is nothing to click. When it exists it will appear alongside the Build Calculator under Tools.
Related reading that already exists
Choosing tools is the second question. These cover the first one.
Building Your First Developer Workbench
A beginner-friendly guide to choosing the coding tools you actually need, without drowning in setup chaos.
Read →Custom Software vs. Off-the-Shelf: A Build-vs-Buy Framework
A practical build-vs-buy framework for deciding which parts of your operation to rent and which to own — including how to measure what your current workarounds actually cost.
Read →MVP vs. Prototype vs. Production Application: What's the Difference (and Which Do You Need)?
A prototype, an MVP, and a production application solve different problems. Here's how to tell which one you actually need before you scope a build.
Read →
Every resource on this site is listed in one place — see All Resources. Stack guides will appear there automatically as they publish.