Insights
Picking a Tech Stack for Early-Stage SaaS (Without Regret in 18 Months)
Boring defaults, clear boundaries, and the few bets worth making when your team is still small.
SaaS tech stack
Optimize for learning speed, not resume keywords
At seed and Series A, your stack should help you ship, hire, and change your mind. Fancy microservices and multi-cloud setups rarely do that.
Defaults that work for most B2B SaaS
- TypeScript end to end — one language for product and tooling lowers bus factor
- Postgres — relational data, JSON when you need it, mature ops story
- A mainstream web framework — Next.js, Rails, or similar with a large hiring pool
- Managed auth — Clerk, Auth0, or Cognito unless auth is your product
- One background job system — do not split queues across three services in year one
These are not exciting. They are replaceable later and easy to explain to your first senior hires.
Where founders over-engineer
- Kubernetes before you have a reliability problem
- Event sourcing before you have a domain model that stabilizes
- Microservices because a blog post said monoliths do not scale (they scale further than you think)
- Building billing from scratch instead of Stripe (or equivalent) until you have a clear reason
The bets worth making early
- — cheap to design well, expensive to retrofit