the indie hacker stack

most indie hacker advice is a tool list with no opinions attached — twenty options per category and a shrug. that's not useful when you're trying to ship in a weekend. this is the stack we'd actually pick if we were starting today: free or near-free until you have users, and every pick has a clear reason behind it.

the theme is leverage over control. you don't need kubernetes, you need a postgres database that just works and an auth flow you didn't have to build yourself. every tool here won on the best free tier and the lowest time-to-first-deploy — not necessarily the one with the most features, since those are features you'll pay for later, once you actually need them.

the one place we'd tell you to spend real attention early: payments. don't roll your own checkout or chase the cheapest processor — polar handles tax compliance you don't want to think about, and that's worth more than saving two percent on fees.