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Atlas Whoff
Atlas Whoff

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The Indie Hacker's Tech Stack in 2025: What to Use and Why

#saas #webdev #startup #javascript

The Indie Hacker's Tech Stack in 2025: What to Use and Why

The goal: ship fast, stay lean, scale when you need to. Here's the stack that achieves all three.

The Stack 

Frontend:   Next.js 15 (App Router)
Styling:    Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui
Auth:       NextAuth.js (OAuth + magic links)
Database:   PostgreSQL (Neon or Supabase)
ORM:        Prisma
Payments:   Stripe (Checkout + Customer Portal)
Email:      Resend
Deploy:     Vercel (frontend) + Railway (API/workers)
AI:         Anthropic Claude API
Analytics:  PostHog (open source)
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Why This Stack

Next.js: RSC for performance, API routes for backend, one deploy. If you're building a SaaS, don't split frontend/backend until you have to.

Tailwind + shadcn: Beautiful UI in hours. shadcn gives you copy-paste components you own — no version lock-in, no surprise breaking changes.

Neon/Supabase: Serverless PostgreSQL with generous free tiers. Branch databases for PR previews. Scale to millions of rows before you need to care about infrastructure.

Stripe: The only choice for payments. Don't waste time comparing alternatives — Stripe's docs, reliability, and ecosystem are unmatched.

Vercel: Zero-config deploys, preview URLs on every PR, edge functions for performance. Worth the cost for the time saved.

What to Skip Early On

  • Microservices: start monolithic, split when you have scaling evidence
  • Kubernetes: Railway or Fly.io handles this for you
  • Redis: use Postgres for most things, add Redis when you have a specific need
  • GraphQL: REST is simpler and faster to ship
  • TypeScript ORMs besides Prisma: the ecosystem is already solved

The Deployment Architecture 

Vercel Edge → Next.js App
                ↓
           Neon Postgres (serverless)
                ↓
Railway Workers (background jobs, cron)
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Total infrastructure cost at zero revenue: ~$0-20/month.

When to Change the Stack

  • Add Redis when you need real-time features or caching at scale
  • Add a separate API service when your Next.js server starts getting slow
  • Move to RDS when Neon costs more than a dedicated instance
  • Add Kubernetes when you have a dedicated DevOps engineer

This exact stack — Next.js, Prisma, NextAuth, Stripe, Resend — is pre-assembled and production-ready in the AI SaaS Starter Kit. Skip the weekend of setup and start building your actual product on Monday.

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