“Should we use React or Flutter? Node or Python? AWS or Azure?” These are some of the first questions founders ask us. The honest answer is that there is no single best stack, only the best stack for your product, team and stage.

Instead of chasing trends, we ask five questions.

1. What are you actually building?

A content-heavy marketing site, a real-time collaboration tool and a data-intensive analytics platform have very different needs. Start from the product’s core requirements, such as real-time updates, offline support, heavy computation or SEO, and choose tools that are strong in those areas.

2. Who will maintain it?

The best technology is one your team can hire for and support for years. Popular, well-documented stacks like React, Node.js, Python and PostgreSQL have large talent pools and mature ecosystems. A niche language may be elegant, but it can make hiring slow and expensive.

Choose boring technology for the parts that don’t make you unique, and spend your innovation budget where it matters.

3. Web, mobile or both?

If you need iOS and Android apps, cross-platform frameworks like Flutter or React Native let one team ship to both platforms, often sharing most of the code. Go native with Swift and Kotlin when you need deep device integration or maximum performance.

4. How fast do you need to scale?

Most startups don’t need microservices on day one. A well-structured monolith on a managed cloud platform is faster to build, cheaper to run and easier to debug. Design clean boundaries in your code so you can split services later, when real traffic tells you where the bottlenecks are.

5. What will it cost to run?

Licences, hosting and third-party services add up. Serverless and managed databases can be very cheap at low traffic but expensive at scale, while the opposite is true for reserved servers. Model your costs at 10x and 100x your launch traffic before committing.

Our typical starting point

For many SaaS products we start with:

But every project is different. If you’re weighing up options, talk to our engineers and we’ll recommend a stack that fits your goals and budget.

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