How to choose your tech stack for your startup in 2025
The stack decision is one of those that either pays off big or costs you big. It’s not just about which framework is trending on Twitter. It’s about development speed, maintenance cost, and ability to scale.
I’ve seen startups pick microservices from day one and burn $40K in infrastructure before reaching 100 users. I’ve also seen teams get stuck with monoliths they couldn’t touch without breaking production.
The golden rule: optimize for change, not for scale
Your startup will pivot. 90% of initial hypotheses are wrong. If your architecture makes refactoring expensive, you’ve already lost.
“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.” — Donald Knuth
Frontend: Next.js, Astro, or Vanilla?
For most SaaS startups in 2025, my recommendation is Next.js with App Router if you need:
- Server Actions for simple mutations without a separate API
- Streaming SSR for low Time to First Byte
- Critical SEO (landing pages, content)
Astro is superior if your product is content-first (blogs, docs, landing pages with little interaction). That’s what we use on this site: 98/100 on PageSpeed with no effort.
Avoid unless you have very specific reasons:
- Create React App (deprecated, no SSR)
- Angular for MVPs (excessive boilerplate)
- Vue if your team already knows React (unnecessary switch cost)
Backend: modular monolith first
Don’t use microservices until you have multiple teams that need to deploy independently.
The architecture that gives the best results for startups:
- Modular monolith with separate domains (Users, Billing, Core)
- Single database with separate logical schemas
- Process queue (Bull, SQS, Temporal) for async work
When to extract a service:
- A domain needs to scale horizontally independently
- A team wants to change the stack of that domain
- You need to deploy that domain 10x more frequently than the rest
Database: PostgreSQL is enough
You don’t need MongoDB for “flexibility.” PostgreSQL with JSONB gives you the same flexibility with transactional consistency.
Data stack we use in production:
| Layer | Technology | When to add it |
|---|---|---|
| Transactional | PostgreSQL | Day 1 |
| Cache | Redis | > 100 req/s repeated |
| Search | pgvector / Elastic | Complex searches |
| Analytics | ClickHouse / BigQuery | > 1M events/month |
| Blob | S3 / R2 | Files, images |
Infrastructure: serverless vs servers
For MVP up to 10K active users:
- Vercel / Railway / Render for deploy without thinking
- Supabase if you need managed Auth + DB + Storage
- AWS/GCP only if you have a dedicated DevOps team
The opportunity cost of setting up Kubernetes in an early phase is huge. Use PaaS until the monthly cost exceeds an SRE’s salary.
Specific decisions we make at TecnoDespegue
For clients with 2-3 month timelines:
- Frontend: Next.js 15 + React 19 + TypeScript
- Styling: Tailwind CSS 4 (velocity over pixel-perfect)
- Backend: Next.js App Router with Server Actions + tRPC if it grows
- DB: PostgreSQL (Supabase or Railway)
- Auth: Lucia / Auth.js (not Firebase Auth — vendor lock-in)
- Payments: Stripe (the only serious option for SaaS)
- Emails: Resend / Loops (deliverability + tracking)
- Analytics: Plausible (GDPR-compliant, no cookie banners)
Checklist before choosing
- Does my team already know this technology?
- Is there cheap and reliable managed hosting?
- Can I find freelance developers if I grow?
- Does it have mature ORM/libraries in my language?
- Can I deploy in < 15 minutes?
- Is there an active community / enterprise support?
If any answer is “no”, reconsider.
Conclusion
The best stack is the one that lets you ship features while you sleep peacefully knowing you won’t need to rewrite everything in 6 months.
TypeScript + PostgreSQL + Next.js/Astro + Vercel/Railway covers 90% of cases. Infrastructure innovation is for when you already have product-market fit.
Got questions about your current stack? Contact us and we’ll do a free 30-minute tech audit.