Question

How do I choose a tech stack for my startup?

Choose the stack your team can ship in, not the stack that sounds most impressive.

Direct answer

Choose based on three things: what your current team can actually build and ship in, what will scale to your realistic next milestone without a rewrite, and what minimizes infrastructure decisions before product-market fit.

Do not optimize for engineering recruiting before you have revenue. Do not choose an enterprise stack at pre-seed scale.

Decision checklist

  • Who is building it — a solo founder, a small team, or a mix of AI tools and contractors?
  • What is the MVP? Does it need real-time features, complex auth, payments, file storage?
  • What is the deploy target — web, mobile, or both?
  • Are there compliance or data residency requirements?
  • What managed services eliminate whole categories of infrastructure work?

A sensible default for 2025–2026

For most web-first SaaS products: TanStack Start or Next.js + Supabase + Cloudflare or Vercel + Stripe. Build it in Lovable or Cursor to accelerate. You can swap any layer later without throwing away the others.