Let me tell you about two founders, Marcus and Sarah.
Marcus spent 14 months building his SaaS with Kubernetes, microservices, GraphQL, and every hot technology from Hacker News. It was a beautiful architecture that could theoretically scale to millions of users.
He launched to zero customers and shut down after burning through his savings.
Sarah built her SaaS in 8 weeks using Laravel, PostgreSQL, and a $12/month VPS. It was a "boring" tech stack that felt embarrassing to talk about at meetups.
She built a business generating hundreds of thousands in ARR and is still running on simple infrastructure.
The pattern is shocking but true: The most successful solo founders often use the most boring tech stacks.
No Kubernetes. No microservices. No cutting-edge frameworks. Just proven, productive tools that let them ship features instead of debugging infrastructure.
This isn't another "ultimate tech stack" guide with affiliate links. This is an analysis of what solo founders actually use to build real, profitable businesses, complete with costs, gotchas, and the uncomfortable truths about what matters when you're a team of one.
Part 1: The Core Stack (The Non-Negotiables)
These are the foundational choices that everything else builds on. Get these right and the rest is easy.
The Framework Decision
Full-stack, monolithic frameworks are the undisputed champions for solo founders. They allow you to move incredibly fast without managing multiple codebases or complex deployments.
Top Choices for Solo Founders:
- Laravel: Often cited for its "batteries-included" philosophy. It comes with robust solutions for authentication, queues, payments, and email out of the box. It's a fantastic choice for B2B SaaS and API-first products.
- Ruby on Rails: Famous for its convention-over-configuration approach and speed of development. The ecosystem of "gems" means you can add complex functionality in minutes. It excels at CRUD-heavy apps and marketplaces.
- Django: A powerhouse for data-heavy applications, with an incredible built-in admin panel that can save weeks of development. Its Python foundation makes it a natural choice for products with ML or data science features.
What About JavaScript-First Frameworks (Next.js, SvelteKit, etc.)?
While popular, these often add complexity for a typical SaaS product, requiring you to manage a separate frontend and backend. This can double your development and deployment overhead. However, if your product is a developer tool aimed at frontend engineers, using a framework they know and love can be a competitive advantage.
The rule that predicts success: Use what you know. Learning a new framework while trying to validate a business is a recipe for burnout. Your existing expertise is your biggest asset.
The Database Decision
This is the simplest decision you'll make: use PostgreSQL.
It handles 99% of use cases for a growing SaaS, including JSONB for flexible data, powerful full-text search, and geospatial features. It's free, open-source, and can scale to millions of records without issue. Don't waste time considering other options unless you have a very specific, well-understood need for a niche database.
The MongoDB Trap: Many founders are tempted by the "flexibility" of NoSQL databases like MongoDB, but this is often a trap. You will eventually need relationships in your data, and trying to force a document database to behave like a relational one often leads to performance issues and complex queries, wasting months of development time.
The Hosting Decision
This is where solo founders often waste the most money. The key is to start simple and cheap, and only scale your infrastructure as your revenue grows.
Pre-$10K MRR: Use a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)
Services like Railway and Render are perfect for this stage. You can deploy your application from a GitHub repository in minutes, and they often include managed databases and other services. A typical setup will cost between $7 and $25 per month.
$10K - $50K MRR: Stay on PaaS or Move to a VPS
If your PaaS bill starts to exceed $150/month, it's time to consider a Virtual Private Server (VPS) from a provider like Hetzner or DigitalOcean. A powerful server can be 10x cheaper than the equivalent resources on a big cloud provider. Using a server management tool like Laravel Forge can make managing a VPS almost as easy as using a PaaS.
What About AWS/GCP/Azure?
Avoid the big cloud providers until you have significant revenue (e.g., >$500K ARR) and a specific need for their services (like complex machine learning pipelines or global infrastructure). The complexity and cost are overkill for an early-stage solo founder.
The Authentication Story
This is a surprising one: most successful B2B SaaS founders build authentication themselves using their framework's built-in capabilities.
- Why it works: It's free, you have complete control over the user experience, there's no vendor lock-in, and you own your user data.
- When to use a service: Use a service like WorkOS or Auth0 only when you need to support enterprise features like SAML/SSO, which are notoriously difficult to build yourself.
Part 2: The Money Stack (How to Get Paid)
- Payment Processing: Stripe is the default choice for a reason. It's easy to integrate, has excellent documentation, and handles subscription billing flawlessly. Use libraries like Laravel Cashier or the Pay gem for Rails to get started in days, not weeks.
- Taxes: Don't let taxes sink your business. Use Stripe Tax to handle US sales tax automatically. For EU VAT, a service like Quaderno is worth its weight in gold once you have significant European sales.
Part 3: The Communication Stack
- Transactional Email: Deliverability is key. Use a dedicated service like Postmark or Resend. They ensure your welcome emails, password resets, and receipts actually land in the inbox.
- Customer Support: Start with a simple email address. It's free, personal, and forces you to talk to your customers. As you grow, you can move to a lightweight helpdesk tool like Help Scout.
Part 4: The Development & Operations Stack
- Version Control: Use GitHub. Its integrations with hosting platforms and CI/CD services are unmatched.
- Error Tracking: Start with nothing but your logs. Once you have paying customers, add Sentry to catch errors before your users do.
- Background Jobs: Use the queue system built into your framework (Laravel Queues, Sidekiq for Rails, Celery for Django). They are powerful, cheap, and easy to manage.
- Analytics: In the beginning, your own database is your best analytics tool. Write simple SQL queries to track signups and conversions. As you grow, add a privacy-focused tool like Plausible or Fathom.
The Uncomfortable Truths About Solo Founder Tech Stacks
- Boring Beats Bleeding Edge: Chasing the latest hot technology is a waste of time you should be spending talking to customers.
- Less Tools = More Revenue: Every tool you add increases complexity, cost, and distraction. Be ruthless about what you include in your stack.
- Your Stack Doesn't Matter (Much): Product-market fit is the primary driver of success. A good stack lets you get there faster; a bad stack can prevent you from ever arriving.
- Premature Optimization Kills: Don't build for a million users when you have zero. A simple, "unscalable" stack will get you to your first 100 customers much faster.
The Bottom Line: Stop Optimizing, Start Shipping
Your tech stack is not your product. It's a tool to build and deliver your product. The most successful solo founders choose boring, productive tools they already know. They spend 5% of their time on infrastructure and 95% on building features customers will pay for.
Your competition is probably over-engineering their stack right now. While they're debating Kubernetes vs. Docker Swarm, you can use a simple PaaS, ship in a week, and get your first paying customer.
That's how you win as a solo founder.
Now stop reading tech stack articles and go build something people will pay for.
Building a solo SaaS? Join BuildVoyage and share your tech stack choices, milestones, and learnings. Your stack evolution story could help another founder avoid months of over-engineering. We're all learning together.
