- Book: Ship It — The Complete Tech Stack Guide for Startup Founders
- My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub
- Me: gabrielanhaia
Last year I kept having the same conversation. Different people, same problem.
"I built the app. It works. Now what?"
The "now what" was always the same list: Where do I host this? How do I accept payments? Do I need to collect VAT? What about GDPR? How do I set up deploys? What happens when the database crashes? Should I use AWS or is that overkill?
These aren't coding questions. They're infrastructure questions, business questions, compliance questions. And nobody was answering them in one place. Every hosting tutorial stops at deployment. Every Stripe guide stops at checkout. Nobody connects the dots from "working code" to "real product that makes money legally."
I looked for a book that covered the full picture. Couldn't find one. So I spent 8 months writing it.
What Ship It actually covers
32 chapters. 306 pages. Every decision between localhost and production.
I organized it around the decisions founders face, roughly in the order they face them. Not by technology category. By the order you'll actually need the answers.
Infrastructure and hosting
The hosting chapter includes four complete stacks at $0, $10, $50, and $200/month. Not "consider a cloud provider." Which provider, which plan, how much, and what the migration looks like when you outgrow it. Real prices from Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Railway, Vercel, and AWS as of April 2026.
The database chapter covers PostgreSQL as the default, when it isn't the right call, and how to set up backups before you need them. The backup section is a real script, not theory. pg_dump to Cloudflare R2 on a cron job. Would've saved a project I worked on years ago where "we'll do backups next week" turned into "we lost two days of user data."
Payments and tax
This is the chapter I wish I'd had three years ago. Most founders pick Stripe because it's the standard and don't realize they've just signed up for a second job: collecting and remitting VAT in 27 EU countries, sales tax across the US, and GST in a dozen more.
The alternative (a Merchant of Record like Lemon Squeezy or Paddle) handles all of it for a higher transaction fee. The chapter breaks down exactly when the math tips in each direction. I've seen a founder get a five-figure VAT bill from Ireland because they didn't know there was a decision to make. That story is in the book. So is how to avoid it.
Auth, security, and compliance
Three chapters, one principle: don't build what you can buy, and don't ignore what you can't see.
Authentication covers why custom auth is a trap ("it's just a login form" is the most dangerous sentence in software), compares Clerk vs Supabase Auth vs Auth.js vs Firebase Auth, and walks through session management, CSRF, OAuth edge cases.
Security is a practical checklist, not the OWASP top 10 you've seen everywhere. Specific Caddy and Nginx configs, input validation with real code, secrets management. An afternoon's work that blocks 99% of the attacks that actually happen to startups.
Privacy and compliance was the hardest section to write. GDPR, CCPA, and global privacy law distilled into what you actually need to do: privacy policy, cookie consent, data access/deletion, processing records. Minimum viable compliance without a law firm.
Tax, legal, and CI/CD
I spent two months on the tax chapter alone. Sales tax, VAT, GST across 30+ countries. Where to incorporate. Business bank accounts by region. It's not legal advice. It's a map of the territory so you know which questions to ask your accountant and don't get blindsided by obligations you didn't know existed.
The CI/CD chapter closes the loop: push-to-deploy GitHub Actions workflows, Sentry for error tracking, uptime monitoring. Set it up once, forget it exists.
The three lenses
Every tool recommendation in the book is evaluated the same way:
Cost at your current stage. Not the enterprise price. Not the price after the free trial expires and you forget to cancel. The actual price you'll pay with 0, 100, or 1,000 users.
Migration difficulty. How locked in are you? Can you leave in a weekend or does it require rewriting half your app? I've been burned by vendor lock-in before. The cheapest option that you can't leave isn't cheap. It's a trap.
Time drain. How much of your week does this tool eat in configuration, maintenance, and debugging? Some "free" tools cost you 10 hours a month in ops work. That's not free. That's expensive.
No affiliate links anywhere in the book. I don't make a cent whether you pick Hetzner or DigitalOcean, Stripe or Paddle. The recommendations are what I'd actually use.
Business-type playbooks
The part that made the book take twice as long as I planned: not every startup needs the same stack.
A SaaS needs multi-tenancy, subscription billing, and SSO. An e-commerce store needs inventory management, shipping calculations, and product images. A marketplace needs split payments, trust & safety, and two-sided onboarding. The infrastructure decisions are completely different.
The second half of the book has dedicated playbooks for six business types:
- SaaS — multi-tenancy patterns, subscription billing, onboarding flows, SSO
- E-commerce — Shopify vs custom, inventory, shipping, product image pipelines
- Marketplace — split payments with Stripe Connect, trust & safety, two-sided onboarding
- Mobile app — App Store rules, the 30% cut, push notifications, offline-first considerations
- API product — API design, rate limiting, developer docs, usage-based billing
- Content platform — CMS selection, CDN configuration, SEO, media processing, moderation
Each playbook covers the decisions specific to that business type. It's not just "use Stripe" — it's "here's how payments work differently for a marketplace with split payouts versus a SaaS with recurring subscriptions."
Who this is for (and who it isn't)
Solo founders who can build software (or have AI that builds it for them) but have never shipped to production with real payments and real compliance. Small teams of 1-3 people making their first infrastructure decisions, googling "best hosting for startups" at midnight and getting nothing but sponsored results. AI-assisted builders who can produce a working app in a weekend but don't know how to get it from localhost to a URL where people can pay them.
It's not a coding tutorial, not a startup strategy book, and not a 400-page AWS manual. If you need to learn React, find product-market fit, or become a cloud architect, this isn't your book. This book assumes you can build software and you need help with everything else.
Why I wrote it
Over a decade of building backend systems for fintechs, startups, and high-growth companies. I've made most of the mistakes you can make. Picked a hosting provider that cost 6x what it should have because I didn't know Hetzner existed. Built a payment integration that didn't handle VAT and triggered a compliance review. Ran a database without proper backups and lost data when it failed.
Every chapter exists because I've either made that mistake or watched someone else make it. The book is the guide I wished existed when I started — the one that says "here's what to pick, here's why, and here's when you'll outgrow it."
The writing process
8 months. Started in mid-2025, published April 2026.
The technical chapters (hosting, databases, CI/CD) were the straightforward part. I've built this stuff for years. Writing it down was mostly organizing what I already knew.
The tax and compliance chapters nearly broke me. Regulations vary by jurisdiction, change frequently, and are written in a language that seems intentionally designed to confuse normal people. I verified every claim, every threshold, every filing requirement across 30+ countries. Then I verified them again because regulations from 2024 were already outdated by 2025.
Every price comparison is current as of April 2026. Those will drift over time. But the decision frameworks, which tier to be on, when to upgrade, what matters more than price, those are durable.
Get the book
Ship It is available now on Amazon — hardcover, 306 pages. Ebook and paperback are dropping in a few days.
If you've been stuck in the gap between "the code works" and "it's a real product," this book is the bridge. Pick a stack, set it up this weekend, ship your thing.
I'd genuinely love to hear from you. What's the infrastructure decision you're stuck on right now? Drop it in the comments — I'll do my best to point you in the right direction. And if you end up reading the book, tell me what you think. Even the parts you disagree with. Especially the parts you disagree with.
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