Picking a modern tech stack that will not haunt your startup

Picking a modern tech stack that will not haunt your startup

Tech stack decisions look small at week one and feel huge at month eighteen. The right stack for a 2-person team is rarely the right stack for a 30-person team — and pretending otherwise costs real money.

Our default starting point is boring: Next.js, a managed Postgres, a clear hosting story, and a thin authentication layer that we don’t own. That covers 90% of the products we see.

Questions we ask before writing any code

• Who maintains this in 12 months — you, us, or a future hire?
• Where is the data, and is it portable?
• What is the realistic concurrency in year one?
• What part of this can a small team actually operate at 2am?

If the answer to ‘who operates this at 2am’ is ‘nobody’, the stack is too fancy. Pick the version of the tool your team can run, debug, and replace.