I think I'd have to say NextJS with SQLite. Every DB table would just be 'id' and 'data', where 'data' is JSON-encoded and the schema is only enforced in code. This lets you write a 30-line ORM. Foreign-key relationships are just modelled as lists. If speed is the major concern, I find this the fastest way to build.
You can bring structure to the DB as things are nailed down.
Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?
221–230 of 736 posts
Re: Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?
#222Hhere is quick survey : Regarding backend choices: curl "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34530052" | grep -i Django | wc -l 36 curl "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34530052" | grep -i supabase | wc -l 17 curl "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34530052" | grep -i rails | wc -l 28 curl "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34530052" | grep -i node | wc -l 15 curl "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=345…
you left out at least vuejs for frontend
Re: Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?
#223I would pick whichever stack that I would be most productive in. A Laravel app hosted with Laravel Vapor (AWS Lambda) with a MariaDB database. Would allow me to get up and running quickly, at low cost and without having to worry about scaling for a long time. Using Tailwind and VueJS or AlpineJS for the frontend.
you should check out https://wasp-lang.dev then. It's probably one of the fastest stacks out there for React + ExpressJS at the moment
Re: Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?
#224The best stack is the one you know.
I guess I’m old school, but I built SimplifyRecipe.com in a few hours using Laravel. That’s not to say that Laravel is better than anything else, but I’m extremely fluent with that ecosystem.
I will say, I believe that Laravel or Ruby on Rails would be my favorite starting point for a solo development effort. I spent 1000+ hours working on JavaScript framework development and found it to be really cumbersome.
Re: Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?
#225Definitely old schools. I am building a MVP right now(kinda building my parachute while jumping off the plane)and I went with Django. And here is why. 1. Very vibrant community of devs and time-tested open-source libraries.If you want a multi-tenancy there is a library for that. IF you want stripe integration there is one for that. If you want "fully built out" services, then we have a plethora of free and paid templ…
Agreed, although I'd really like to throw in type safety, because the lack of it made my life needlessly complicated. Is this feasible with Python?
It’s not enforced at runtime, but otherwise I feel like typing is in a pretty good place in Python right now. If you’re diligent about using Pyright or MyPy as linters it makes life a lot easier.
Re: Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?
#226Hhere is quick survey : Regarding backend choices: curl "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34530052" | grep -i Django | wc -l 36 curl "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34530052" | grep -i supabase | wc -l 17 curl "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34530052" | grep -i rails | wc -l 28 curl "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34530052" | grep -i node | wc -l 15 curl "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=345…
you left out at least vuejs for frontend
still collecting frontend parts
Re: Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?
#227CL with Hunchentoot and PostgreSQL on the back end, probably.
Re: Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?
#228These days with Hotwire and HTMX, you can go very far with Django/Rails (and I suppose Elixir too). Not having to write an API for your webapp to consume is huge. Until you actually have reason to scale (eg you are building WhatsApp), building to optimize the productivity of your iteration cycle usually gives the best payoff for pre-PMF projects.
> Not having to write an API for your webapp to consume is huge.
This is something that is so understated. I use Blazor to achieve similar semantics in many .NET codebases.
The speedup you get by pulling the client state into the server is incredible. The time savings is easily measured in thousands of hours at this point. It's almost like working with old school PHP again, but you get all the 2-way stuff as well.
Re: Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same, Next.js, Vercel, Prisma, Supabase. I push to my GitHub repo and the site is live and deployed in less than a minute. With the stack you can use the same language, DTOs, libraries, etc.. both server and client side. Server side rendering ensures a graceful handoff between server rendered state and the resulting app state on the client. I’m also using MUI which includes all the components you need for a front end…
Wish I could afford vercel
Remember we’re talking about MVP. Moving this stack to a VPS would only add a day.
Re: Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?
#230For an MVP, I'd choose what I'm most familiar with and can be fastest with. That would mean: 1. Laravel 2. An Ubuntu VPS in either Digital Ocean or Linode 3. A managed database in one of those services, likely Postgres That would get me to market the quickest. I have no issues with the application being in Laravel/PHP and after getting to market, I'd work on making the infrastructure scalable. I wouldn't expect overn…
> For an MVP, I'd choose what I'm most familiar with and can be fastest with.
That is absolutely the takeaway here. Use the technology you are familiar with and/or can be fastest with. MVPs are risky enough, don't add in "oh, gosh, I have to learn the tech (libraries, deployments, monitoring, database access, etc)" as well.
The only case where I'd pick a new tech for an MVP is when there is an existing open source or free project that I could use that would obviously get the project shipped faster by providing extensive pre-built functionality.
For example, I once used Sharetribe https://github.com/sharetribe/sharetribe even though I was only an intermediate ruby programmer because, after time spent evaluating it and other solutions, it had functionality that could get us shipped faster.
From "git init" to our first beta customer was 1 month of time. Then to our first paying customer was 1 more month. One developer (me). To be fair, my co-founder had done a ton of market development before I started coding, so the initial market/feature discovery was done; that's a huge part of any MVP.