The Stack: five tools that handle everything

Every app you build needs the same five things: something to write the code, somewhere to put it, a place to store data, a way to take money, and a way to make it look like a real product.

You can burn a week researching each one. Or you can use the five below, which is what I use, and spend that week building instead.

Build in this order

Design the screens, generate the frontend, wire the database, add payments, deploy. Skipping ahead to payments before you have screens will waste your afternoon.

Coding: Claude Code

Claude Code runs in your terminal and edits your codebase directly. You describe a feature, it reads the relevant files, proposes a plan, then writes the code across however many files the change touches. It runs your tests, reads the errors, and fixes what it broke.

Copilot completes the line you're typing, which helps when you already know what to type. Claude Code takes a task like "add password reset with email verification" and handles the route, the email template, the database column, and the error states.

Cursor sits between them and it's a real option, especially if you want to see every diff before it lands. I moved off it because I stopped wanting to watch.

Two settings that matter. Plan mode: hit Shift+Tab twice and Claude reads your code and writes a plan without touching a file. You approve it, then it builds. Use this for anything that spans more than two files. Read the plan like a contract and push back on the parts that look wrong, because fixing a plan costs you thirty seconds and fixing a bad implementation costs you an hour.

CLAUDE.md: drop a markdown file in your project root with your stack, your conventions, and anything you're tired of repeating. Claude reads it at the start of every session. Mine says which package manager to use, that I want TypeScript strict mode, and that it should never install a dependency without asking.

Cost: included with Claude Pro at $20 a month. Heavy use pushes you to Max.

Hosting: Vercel

Vercel connects to your GitHub repo. You push, it builds, it deploys, you get a URL. Every branch gets its own preview link, so you can send a working version of a half-finished feature to a friend without touching production.

GoDaddy sells you shared hosting and a control panel, and you upload files into it. Nothing rebuilds when you push, nothing rolls back when you break something, and there are no preview URLs because there's no build step. It's a product from before deployment was automatic, and people still buy it because they bought the domain there and clicked the next thing.

Netlify does the same job as Vercel and does it well. Vercel wins on one thing: they build Next.js, so if you're on Next.js the integration is tighter than anyone else can make it.

Cost: free for personal projects. $20 a month per person when you outgrow it.

Backend: Supabase

Supabase gives you a real Postgres database, plus auth, file storage, and auto-generated APIs on top of it. You get a dashboard to click around your tables and a client library that talks to them from your app.

AWS can do all of this and about four hundred other things, and you'll spend your first two days in IAM figuring out why the hell one service can't talk to another. Supabase gives you the same Postgres underneath with the setup already done. When you eventually outgrow it, you're already on standard Postgres, so you leave with your data and your schema intact.

Firebase is the other common pick and it's fine for prototypes. The problem shows up later: it's NoSQL, so the first time you need to join two collections and sort by a field in the second one, you find out you can't. Postgres does that in one query.

The thing that will get you hacked: row level security. Supabase exposes your tables through an API, and the anon key that ships in your frontend is public by design. RLS is what stops a stranger from reading your entire users table. Turn it on for every table and write a policy for each one, even the tables you think are boring.

Cost: free tier is generous. $25 a month when you need more.

Payments: Stripe

Stripe handles checkout, subscriptions, refunds, invoices, failed cards, and the tax paperwork most people forget about. Stripe Checkout gives you a hosted payment page, which means you redirect the user to Stripe, they pay, they come back. You never touch a card number.

PayPal moves money too. The gap is everything around it. Stripe's docs are the best in the industry, the test mode lets you simulate declined cards and expired subscriptions before you launch, and the dashboard tells you why a payment failed instead of showing you a code. PayPal's developer experience feels like it was finished in 2013 and maintained by people who left.

Lemon Squeezy is worth knowing about. They act as merchant of record, which means they collect and file sales tax and VAT for you across every country you sell to. That's a real problem you'd otherwise solve yourself at 11pm in March. They take a bigger cut for it. If you're selling software to strangers on the internet and you don't want to think about tax, that trade is worth it.

Cost: 2.9% plus 30 cents per US card charge. No monthly fee.

Design: v0

You describe an interface or upload a screenshot, and v0 generates React components using Tailwind and shadcn/ui. That's real code you paste into your project.

Canva makes images. You can't ship an image. Everything you make there has to be rebuilt by hand in code before a user can click it, so you did the design work twice.

Figma is the professional answer and designers use it for good reason. For one person building an app alone, Figma is a detour. You spend an hour arranging rectangles that produce zero working code, then you build the thing anyway.

Use it like this:

• Name the shadcn component you want. "Use a Sheet for mobile nav" gets you a much better result than describing the behavior and hoping.
• Upload a screenshot of any app whose layout you like and ask for something in that shape.
• Ask for responsive behavior out loud, because it doesn't always assume it.

Where it stops: v0 builds screens. It doesn't build your backend logic or your database schema, and it gets worse when you point it at an existing codebase with its own design system. Generate the UI in v0, then hand the project to Claude Code for everything after that.

Cost: free tier gives you credits to try it, $20 a month after.

What this costs

Free while you build. Around $65 a month once you're paying for Claude, Vercel, and Supabase, plus Stripe's cut of whatever you actually sell. That's less than most people spend on subscriptions they forgot about.

The one thing to remember

Four of these five tools will fail loudly. Your build breaks, your deploy fails, your payment errors out, and you fix it.