Answer eight quick questions and get back a complete, named stack — frontend, backend, database, auth, payments, email, analytics, hosting — with the one-line rationale for each pick and an estimated monthly cost.
Methodology. Pricing verified against vendor sites as of June 2026. Recommendations are research synthesis of public docs and community reports, not first-person hands-on tests. Use the override section below if your situation doesn’t fit the defaults.
The quiz is a deterministic decision tree, not an AI black box. Each of the eight answers feeds into a hand-curated rule table that maps your situation to a specific tool in each of the eight stack categories. We optimized the defaults for a solo or two-person founder shipping a real product in 2026 — not a 50-engineer team, not a hobby project. The rules favor proven, well-documented choices with active communities and shallow learning curves over the latest framework on Hacker News. If two tools were close on merits, we picked the one with the smoother free-tier-to-paid ramp.
Why Supabase is the default database. One $25/mo Postgres bill covers your database, auth for 100K monthly active users, S3-compatible file storage with 100 GB included, 2M edge function invocations, and realtime row-level subscriptions. For a solo founder, replicating that bundle around Neon or PlanetScale typically costs an extra $40–$80/mo and adds three vendor relationships. The crossover where it stops paying for itself sits around 10K MAU plus heavy 24/7 compute — covered in our Supabase vs Neon and Supabase vs Firebase breakdowns. Below that scale, the bundle wins on price and time saved.
Why Clerk is the default auth. Clerk’s free tier covers 10,000 MAU with no time limit, includes social logins, magic links, MFA, and organizations, and ships React + Next.js + Expo SDKs that wire up in roughly fifteen minutes. The Pro plan is a flat $25/mo plus $0.02 per MAU above 10K. The free tier alone carries most pre-product-market-fit SaaS into the first 12–18 months. We compare it head-to-head in Clerk vs Supabase Auth and Clerk vs Auth0. When the recommendation switches to Supabase Auth, it’s because you’re already paying Supabase Pro and the marginal cost of using its bundled auth is zero.
Why Stripe is the default payments choice. Stripe at 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction is the most-documented checkout integration on the open web, and the time-to-paid-customer with Stripe Checkout is measured in hours. Stripe Tax adds 0.5% per transaction and removes one of the worst pieces of operational drudgery for US + EU sellers. The recommendation flips to Lemon Squeezy or Polar when you’re selling globally on day one — the merchant-of-record model collects and remits VAT/GST/sales tax across 100+ jurisdictions in exchange for a higher per-transaction fee (5% + 50¢ on Lemon Squeezy). The math is in Lemon Squeezy vs Stripe.
Why Resend is the default email provider. Resend launched in late 2023 with the explicit goal of being the developer-friendly transactional email service Stripe-grade founders want. Its React Email integration lets you build templates as JSX components, the API is a one-line send, and the free tier (3,000 emails/mo) covers most pre-launch SaaS. At $20/mo for 50,000 emails, it’s priced below Postmark and SendGrid for the same volume. The recommendation switches to Postmark only when deliverability reliability at high scale becomes more important than developer experience — see Resend vs Postmark.
Why PostHog is the default analytics layer. PostHog’s free tier includes 1 million product analytics events, 5,000 session recordings, 1 million feature flag requests, and 1,500 survey responses every month. For a solo founder, that’s effectively unlimited until you hit serious scale. It also bundles feature flags, A/B testing, and product analytics into one dashboard — tools that would otherwise require LaunchDarkly, Mixpanel, and Hotjar separately. The recommendation switches to Plausible when EU privacy posture or simplicity (no cookies, no consent banner) matters more than flags and recordings — covered in Plausible vs PostHog vs Fathom.
Why Vercel is the default host. Hobby is free for non-commercial use; Pro starts at $20 per developer seat per month and includes a $20 monthly credit for compute and bandwidth. For a Next.js app under 1 TB of monthly egress and a couple of background functions, your Vercel bill is $20/mo. The DX advantage — preview deployments per PR, instant rollbacks, edge functions on the same platform — saves time you’d otherwise spend wiring CI/CD. We compare against Cloudflare Pages and Railway in Vercel vs Cloudflare Pages and Vercel vs Railway.
You’re building something compute-heavy on a tight budget. The default recommendation includes Vercel + Supabase Pro, which together cost about $45/mo at idle. If you’re pre-revenue and watching every dollar, swap Vercel for Cloudflare Pages (free tier handles real traffic) and ride the Supabase free tier until you hit its 500 MB / 5 GB egress / 50K MAU limits. That stack runs at $0/mo until you outgrow it. The tradeoff is more wiring — you write your own CI, your dashboards are spartan, and Supabase will pause your free project after 7 days of no traffic.
You’re selling to one enterprise customer who needs SAML SSO tomorrow. The picker recommends WorkOS or Clerk’s Enterprise add-on for SSO-day-one founders. If your reality is "I have one specific deal contingent on SSO," go directly to WorkOS — their SSO product is $125 per connection per month with full SAML + SCIM, and you can ship a working integration in a single afternoon. Don’t pay for Clerk Enterprise for a single connection; don’t roll your own SAML. Read WorkOS review for the full picture.
You’re going mobile-first from week one. The picker recommends React Native + Expo + Clerk + Supabase for mobile-first, but if you’re a Swift developer with a strong native iOS preference, build native Swift first and only re-evaluate cross-platform when Android demand materializes. The cross-platform tradeoff is real and the calculus depends on your existing skills.
You’re truly global on day one. The picker switches you to Lemon Squeezy or Polar for payments, but if your customer base is concentrated in just one non-US country (e.g., 80% UK), Stripe with the right country-specific tax registrations may end up cheaper than the 5%+ merchant-of-record fee. The MoR premium is worth it across 10+ countries, not 1–2.
This picker is the fastest way to get a coherent recommendation, but the long-form research behind it lives in three places. Best SaaS tools for developers covers the full menu of options in each category with the tradeoffs spelled out. Solo founder tech stack walks through the exact stack we’d build today, with rationale for every pick. Best AI tools for solo SaaS founders goes one layer deeper into the AI-augmented build layer (Cursor, Claude Code, Lovable) on top of the stack this picker recommends.
The stack, prompts, pricing, and mistakes to avoid — for solo founders building with AI.