Every web development project starts with the same decision: which tools do I reach for? The choices you make early determine how fast you can move, how much you'll fight your stack, and how well the project holds up as it grows.
After building across a range of projects — side projects, client work, and production applications — I've settled on a core set of tools that I use consistently in 2026. They cover everything: database, auth, deployment, payments, email, analytics, error tracking, caching, and AI primitives.
Here's the full stack, why each tool earns its place, and what this looks like in practice when you're building real things.
The Stack
| Tool | Purpose | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Claude | AI-assisted coding | $20/mo |
| Supabase | Backend / database | Free |
| Vercel | Deployment & hosting | Free |
| Namecheap | Domain registration | $12/yr |
| Stripe | Payments | 2.9% / txn |
| GitHub | Version control | Free |
| Resend | Transactional email | Free |
| Clerk | Auth & user management | Free |
| Cloudflare | DNS & CDN | Free |
| PostHog | Product analytics | Free |
| Sentry | Error tracking | Free |
| Upstash | Redis / rate limiting | Free |
| Pinecone | Vector database (AI) | Free |
Total monthly cost: ~$20
Why Each Tool Earns Its Spot
Claude ($20/mo) is the only line item that isn't infrastructure — it's leverage. I use it throughout every project for generating boilerplate, debugging, refactoring, writing tests, and thinking through architecture decisions. It compresses hours of work into minutes and has fundamentally changed how fast I can ship.
Supabase (Free) handles the entire backend: a PostgreSQL database, real-time subscriptions, row-level security, storage, and auto-generated APIs. What would have required months of backend engineering to build a decade ago now takes an afternoon to configure.
Vercel (Free) makes deployment invisible. Push to GitHub, and your app is live in under a minute. Edge functions, preview deployments, automatic HTTPS — all free on the hobby plan.
Namecheap (~$1/mo annualised) is where I register domains. Clean UI, competitive pricing, no dark patterns. At $12 per year, a proper domain is no longer a real budget consideration.
Stripe (2.9%/transaction) is the one cost that scales with success, which is how it should be. Zero fixed cost, no subscription, no setup fees. You only pay when you're making money. Stripe's API is exceptional, their documentation is the gold standard, and their fraud tools are battle-tested.
GitHub (Free) needs no explanation. Version control, CI/CD pipelines via Actions, issue tracking, pull requests. The free tier is extraordinarily generous.
Resend (Free) is the cleanest transactional email API I've used. React Email templates, a simple API, 3,000 free emails per month. For a new product, that's more than enough to handle welcome emails, password resets, and notifications without paying a cent.
Clerk (Free) handles authentication end-to-end: sign-up, sign-in, social OAuth, MFA, user profiles, and organization management. Building auth yourself in 2026 is a waste of time. Clerk's pre-built components are polished, their SDK integrates in minutes, and the free tier covers up to 10,000 monthly active users.
Cloudflare (Free) manages DNS and provides a global CDN, DDoS protection, and SSL certificates — all for free. Point your domain at Cloudflare and you immediately inherit one of the most robust network infrastructures on the planet.
PostHog (Free) gives you product analytics that are genuinely powerful: session recordings, funnels, A/B testing, feature flags, and event tracking. Open-source at its core, enterprise-grade in its capabilities.
Sentry (Free) means you find out when something breaks before your users email you. Error tracking, performance monitoring, release health — it integrates in a few lines of code.
Upstash (Free) provides serverless Redis: rate limiting, caching, background queues, session storage. The serverless model means it costs nothing when you're not using it, and scales seamlessly when you are.
Pinecone (Free) is a vector database for AI-native applications — semantic search, recommendation systems, retrieval-augmented generation. Embedding vectors are becoming a standard primitive, and Pinecone makes them accessible from day one.
What Makes a Good Stack
The best stacks aren't the ones with the most tools — they're the ones where every tool has a clear job and does it well without fighting the others. The stack above has been refined through real projects, and each tool in it has survived that process.
A few principles that guided these choices:
Pick tools with excellent developer experience, great documentation, and generous free tiers. Your stack should accelerate you, not slow you down with ops overhead.
Notice what's not on this list: no self-hosted databases, no custom auth implementation, no bare-metal servers, no home-grown email infrastructure. Every one of those is a solved problem in 2026, and solving it yourself again is a distraction from building the actual product.
The goal is to spend your time writing application code — the features that are unique to your project — and let proven services handle everything else. This stack lets you do exactly that.
Pick the tools that get out of your way and let you build.
