Ask HN: What’s your preferred stack for early stage startups?

Many people say Ruby on Rails is the preferred choice for startups because it helps you move faster. I wonder what other people’s experiences have been, though.

By early stage startup I mean the following: 1) no revenue; 2) solo developer; 3) no product-market fit (need to change rapidly).

Coming from a JAMStack, my initially thought is that Rails gives you many problems you shouldn’t have to deal with at early stage: managing serves and databases, performance considerations, costs, etc.

If you use something like Firebase + Next.js, you can basically focus on developing your product (no infrastructure work needed) and have zero costs until you have hundreds (or even thousands) of users.

It feels like a much better options for startups, so I wonder if I’m missing something here. How’s your experience with web frameworks for early stage startups? Is there a way to have zero costs using something like Rails or Django?

I wrote a post about this recently: https://dev.to/levinunnink/how-to-pick-the-right-tech-stack-...

I'm pretty sold on JAMStack + Serverless + AWS. It's the most affordable way to iterate, adapt and scale for a solo dev.

"managing serves and databases"

I can spin up a new Rails-based set of droplets (aka VPSes) on DigitalOcean in about 30 minutes with some shell scripts, so that's not really an issue for an early stage startup IMHO. I've used Next.js and while it's nice as a way to bootstrap a React app, I would never use it to quickly build a robust startup product as a solopreneur. I would also never use a single data store platform like Firebase over using good ol' PostgreSQL + Redis.

Majestic monolith frameworks such as Rails and related proven architecture have never let me down in 12+ years of web app development…whereas I've been bitten many times by attempting to use the latest hotness because of a mythical future where it will have been worth that effort!

These days, Rails 6 and various related gems is like a superpower…providing so much standard web app functionality out of the box that I can simply focus on what makes my product unique. The amount of "yak shaving" (aka futzing with the tech stack itself) is cut to bare minimum.

DigitalOcean starts at $5/month. Not much more than $0. :)

Interesting, you might want to check out FaunaDB if you like the Serverless idea. Disclaimer: I work there but stumbled on your article after my hours.