Stacks
12 items
What you'd build if you were cloning Cal.com today: bookings, payments, transactional email, and a real Postgres database, deployed to Vercel.
The boilerplate stack hundreds of indie SaaS launched with in 2024, 2026. Marc Lou's ShipFast turned this into a paid template; the underlying pieces are all open.
The reference stack from Vercel's AI SDK templates: streaming responses from Claude or GPT, served from Next.js, with auth, payments, and chat history wired up.
What you ship if you describe an app to Lovable on Monday and want it live by Friday. Lovable handles UI + auth + DB; Stripe and Resend bolt on for payments and email.
What most YC W25/S25 batches launched with: code by hand in Cursor with Claude, ship to Vercel, pay Stripe, store in Supabase, log in via Clerk, debug with Sentry.
Python on the backend, React on the frontend. The classic 'serious team, opinionated stack' choice, Django's batteries handle auth, admin, ORM, and forms; React (via Vite) handles the SPA UX.
Ruby on Rails as the API backbone, React + Vite for the frontend. The pragmatic middle ground, keep Rails' productivity for data and auth, drop in React only where the UX needs it.
The 2024-2026 DHH stack: Rails 8, Hotwire for HTML-over-the-wire interactivity, SQLite as the production database. No React, no SPA, server-rendered HTML, and that's a real SEO advantage.
PHP base done right: Laravel for the framework, Livewire for reactive UI without writing JS, Postgres for storage. The 'modern PHP indie SaaS' setup popular among solo founders shipping with Laravel Forge.
@levelsio's signature setup: vanilla PHP, jQuery, SQLite, all on one VPS. Five Pieter products, ~1.5M revenue, zero microservices. The proof that boring tech ships.
The 2026 'I'm not really a coder' indie stack: Lovable generates the React app, Supabase provides the Postgres backend + auth, Resend handles transactional email. From idea to live SaaS in a weekend.
[Theo Browne](https://x.com/t3dotgg)'s opinionated Next.js stack: TypeScript end-to-end, tRPC for the API, Prisma or Drizzle for the DB, Tailwind for styles, NextAuth for sessions. The de-facto setup for typesafe full-stack TS shops.