What tech stacks are indie hackers using for their apps, and why?

Python for the code, Postgres for the backend, Markdown for the frontend. Because I am too lazy to reinvent the wheel, and most of that is good enough.<p>I would have much preferred to use Perl, R, dotnet, or just about anything else, but there was an already made library in Python that was good enough for 90% of my needs, and 100% with some elbow grease, so my lazyness made me learn Python instead!<p>But wait- it gets dirtier than this! The code is done is Vi, with no care in the world about version control (rsync does most of what I need: backups), and deployed to servers by manual SCP, with no automatic tests, no care about CD or automatization - yet: as I need more and more servers, I realize I have to spend time learning say ansible to provision them faster than a copy paste of bash (I have low standards but I won&#x27;t do curl|bash, just... no) but I am delaying that as much as possible to concentate on implementation.<p>The servers are on Debian VMs on Azure, just because they gave me free credits and do not perform as bad as AWS. When the free credits run out, I will move to DO. Then I will see what else I can use, and that will be the right time to care about ansible or whatever.<p>It is as ugly as I can get away with to get my MVP out, using tech from 1996 lol.

I&#x27;m working on a new project as a solo developer.<p>I&#x27;m writing it in Elixir and Phoenix (Elixir&#x27;s goto web framework) with PostgreSQL to back my data. For the front end, I&#x27;m using good old fashioned server side rendered templates and Turbolinks with sprinkles of Javascript where needed.<p>Despite having worked with Flask and Rails for the last 6-7 years I&#x27;m going for Elixir this time around because there are aspects of the app that lend itself well to what Phoenix has to offer and I&#x27;m using this as an opportunity to grow as a developer. Every time I learn a new language &#x2F; framework I find myself leveling up in other technologies I know.<p>So far I&#x27;m super excited with the way things are turning out. I&#x27;m still pretty early on in the project but I&#x27;ve gotten a decent amount of functionality implemented already.<p>I&#x27;m really surprised Elixir isn&#x27;t more popular. The language author and the supporting community is awesome, and I&#x27;ve been the happiest I&#x27;ve ever been working with this tech stack. Of course I&#x27;m still drinking the &quot;omg this is new and awesome&quot; kool-aid, but even without really knowing everything too well, I&#x27;m able to accomplish real world tasks and that&#x27;s all I care about in the end.

Go and, honestly, sqlite with backups written to S3. It&#x27;s the absolute cheapest. I can run multiple apps on a t2.nano (t2.micro if I am feeling fancy). My apps cost something like $1.50 to run a month, and they can easily handle medium-sized traffic, plus Go is just so dead simple to deploy. scp a build binary, and boom I am done. Once the app grows and more collaboration&#x2F;developers&#x2F;requirements call for it, I will add more infrastructure.

Not that I&#x27;m counting, but there are 20 mentions of React, 13 mentions of Vue, 10 mentions of Python, 9 mentions of Go, 8 mentions of rails. The OP had a couple mentions of Wordpress.<p>AND Zero mentions of Meteor, lol!<p>I think I&#x27;m the only indie developer using Meteor and Blaze, but I have to say they make my life WAY better. Granted, it took some time to figure out exactly how to optimize the stack to make it scale correctly, but NOW Meteor is the only solution I&#x27;ve heard of that does this:<p><i>Meteor now automatically builds two sets of client-side assets, one tailored to the capabilities of modern browsers, and the other designed to work equally well in all supported browsers, so that legacy browsers can continue working exactly as they did before. This “legacy” bundle is equivalent to what Meteor 1.5 and 1.6 delivered to every browser, so the crucial difference in Meteor 1.7 is simply that modern browsers will begin receiving code that is much closer to what you originally wrote.</i><p>The apps I build now run like native apps in a modern browser. Laser fast. It&#x27;s beautiful, like the first time using broadband.<p>After everyone and their mother proclaimed Meteor to be dead, they rose from the grave and locked in like Godzilla. I don&#x27;t begrudge anyone their choices, but if you haven&#x27;t taken a look at Meteor lately, having used Wordpress, Rails, Ember, React, and vanilla JS with node in the past, I&#x27;m very grateful Meteor&#x27;s development team is STILL knocking it out of the park.

It’s not cool anymore but I use PHP and MySQL with a $5&#x2F;mo inmotionhosting account. This is after I decided to not take on the overhead of native with multiple code base and App Store deployments. Good ol’ webapp it is.<p>However every single day I do wish there was a solution for my webapp to get access to contacts on the phone and of course notifications. It would have been a game changer given the nature of the product. Currently it is a world of compromises for hobby developers (shameless plug: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ping3.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ping3.com</a>)

For getting web apps up fast, React, Firebase, Git, and Heroku. It&#x27;s a well trodden path so the tooling is simple and the components are reliable.<p>For my VR stuff... Unity is really the only choice that&#x27;s fast to get off the ground, so Unity it is.<p>For hacking together backend heavy stuff, Python. Flask if I need to expose an API endpoint. Postgres if I need a real database, sqlite if I don&#x27;t. Deployed to my evergreen playpen virtual instance via Docker containers because it&#x27;s, once again, a well trodden, simple, and undramatic path.

I built FormAPI [1] with Ruby on Rails. I used plain Rails views for most of the CRUD things, and used React&#x2F;Redux to build the template editor [2], which is pretty complex. I&#x27;ve been extremely productive with Rails, and the performance has not been an issue at all. My plan is to rewrite the API and workers in Elixir when it will save me $2,000 per month on hosting costs. And even then, I would probably be making so much money that it wouldn&#x27;t matter.<p>I started on Heroku, but I had a lot of free AWS credits from Stripe Atlas that I wanted to use. So I moved to Convox [3] on AWS, and it has been absolutely awesome. I have a rock-solid cluster across 3 different availability zones, and I&#x27;m also running Postgres with high availability (RDS).<p>I haven&#x27;t had a single second of downtime since I migrated [4] (I up the status dashboard a few months ago, but moved to AWS earlier than that.) Convox supports auto-scaling and rolling deploys. It waits for the web process to be healthy, and if something crashes it rolls back the deploy without any downtime. I can also terminate any instance at will, and another one will pop up to replace it with zero downtime. After using it for the last ~6 months, I feel confident enough to start offering a 99.999% SLA.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;formapi.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;formapi.io</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;formapi.io&#x2F;templates&#x2F;tpl_DEMO42TmQjTgsQ7q&#x2F;edit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;formapi.io&#x2F;templates&#x2F;tpl_DEMO42TmQjTgsQ7q&#x2F;edit</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;convox.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;convox.com</a><p>[4] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.formapi.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.formapi.io</a>

Flask (hosted by pythonanywhere) and Neo4j from Graphene.<p>Chose both because I wanted consistency between the abstraction of my business logic, and the spec of my implementation.<p>I get some chippy guff about using graphs, but by taking the time to define my business logic as a grammar, expressing that grammar as a graph, then implementing it directly into the model, I get a lot of &quot;aha,&quot; moments from potential customers.<p>Graphs can be analogous to functional languages in that if you are using them, there is a higher likelyhood you&#x27;ve reasoned something through before implementing it.

I actually wound up building most of my current project in Rust, on top of actix-web.<p>Partly because I&#x27;m apparently a masochist, but also because... I mean c&#x27;mon, modern architecture is CRUD and job queues. Rust can do that fine if you don&#x27;t get distracted by the bells and whistles.<p>I ripped out and open sourced my user-module stuff for authentication handling, if anyone&#x27;s interested: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ryanmcgrath&#x2F;jelly" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ryanmcgrath&#x2F;jelly</a>

My stack: Gitlab CI&#x2F;CD, deploying using Ansible to Docker Swarm, running Keycloak for auth, RabbitMQ for messaging, Postgres, Elixir&#x2F;Phoenix for the API server (GraphQL), Apollo + React Native for frontend and mobile apps.<p>Why? For me it&#x27;s best of breed vs simplicity. OpenID Connect is the most mature auth, rabbitmq very good messaging, elixir a lovely language, graphql the most programmer-friendly connection between frontend and backend, and react native allows 90% code sharing between web SPA and mobile apps.<p>And if you combine all of these (I mean if you finally set it all up), it&#x27;s a low number of lines of code environment.

Speaking for myself: mainly Groovy and Grails, with a little Java mixed in. Postgresql when I need a relational DB. Bootstrap for basic CSS, and jQuery to add AJAXy bits. I have not yet adopted a JS framework like React or Vue, although I&#x27;ve been looking at giving Vue a shot. I use Ansible for automation, Git for version control, Eclipse as an IDE. Deploy to CentOS linux mostly. Just starting to go down the path of adopting Docker and (probably) Kubernetes. Cloud infrastructure is either Linode or AWS.<p>All of that said, I&#x27;m a big believer in &quot;use the right tool for the job&quot; so if something comes up that requires C++, I&#x27;ll use C++. If something needs Python, then Python it will be. If Prolog is right for something, I&#x27;ll use Prolog. Or COBOL, or Erlang, or Ruby, or CL, or Perl, or SNOBOL, etc., etc, yadda, yadda, ad infinitum...

My side project is using Rails, React, Postgres, and deployed to heroku. There’s nothing flashy but I can prototype quickly and it’s easy for 2 people to manage.

My software dev path: Didn&#x27;t know anything serious about web dev&#x2F;software systems 12 months ago. So if my stack seems shiny, I just picked what many people on Medium&#x2F;Hacker News were talking&#x2F;raving about.<p>Front-end: React SPA (Via Create React App),Redux, React-Bootstrap Why: I had no prior framework experience, single command setup, and plenty questions on Stack Overflow and Medium articles to learn with. Going the plain Javascript route with no frame work,seemed like I would be on a slippery slope for spaghetti code down the line. React&#x27;s one-way data flow and component architecture made things incredibly easy to mentally digest. I found React&#x27;s documentation VERY well organized and explained, and Vue&#x27;s documentation was intimidating when compared to React.<p>Version Control: BitBucket Git Why: Free private tier for solo use and enjoyed previous experience with Atlassian products<p>CI&#x2F;CD: BitBucket Pipelines Why: Already using Bitbucket, this just worked seamlessly with it. Only $10 for 1000 more build minutes.<p>Firebase: Hosting&#x2F;Cloud Functions&#x2F;Firestore&#x2F;Auth Why: Everything is automagical HTTPS static website hosting for the create-react-app (This is what first got me started) Then came Storage,Firestore,Cloud Functions, and Auth. Wish it had an automagical SQL product. Low Entry Cost<p>Cloud Provider: Google Cloud Why: Had no experience with any cloud provider. I found the pricing&#x2F;product offerings really easy to digest and interpret when compared to AWS.<p>Email Sender: Sendgrid Why: Good starting free tier. Decent Docs. Easy to setup.<p>Backend Compute: Google Compute Engine +Docker+Python-based API app Why: I can do local dev easily with Docker, push the image to Google Container Registry, then pull the image to the VM. It&#x27;s easier to do than learning to setup a CI&#x2F;CD piped GKE cluster Eventually I want to pay the &quot;tax&quot; go to a GKE CI&#x2F;CD Kelsy Hightower setup,so I can git push&#x2F;PR&#x2F;merge a change, and it&#x27;s in production. I don&#x27;t do enough changes to the backend right now to justify a CI&#x2F;CD piped GKE setup.<p>Other: Email Client: Gsuite Why: Custom Domain Name I&#x27;m already familiar with Gmail<p>Project Management: Trello Why: Integrates with Bitbucket Multi Device Support (Phone,Tablet,Desktop) Easy to mind map and organize features<p>What I value: Good Docs Free tier for solo devs&#x2F;low use, and progressive options for paid plans (Gives me breathing room on cash while I figure things out) Lots of questions&#x2F;answers on Stack Overflow or in-depth Medium articles.

Currently been working on a web app for about 8 months.<p>Python for the backend under the argument of &quot;build using what you know&quot;. ReactJS for frontend development because Python for frontend work I find very antiquated.<p>Architecture wise I&#x27;m hosted in AWS. Data is stored in MySQL and Redis. All self hosted because I&#x27;m to cheap to pay per request pricing and the overhead is very minor when done right when rolling my own

I use multiplatform Kotlin to compile shared business logic to JVM and Javascript. The frontend then uses Typescript+React&#x2F;Redux while the backend is a Kotlin Spring app with Postgres.

For the backend I start with Node, then get tired of the runtime errors and switch to Go. Go is cool but soon I get tired of writing “if err == nil” so I switch to Haskell. Haskell is nice but soon I get tired of not finding decent libraries for some not very popular things that I use, so I say fuck it and go to rails. Ruby is nice and Rails feels well thought out and solid, but then I can’t help be annoyed that it’s not fast, so fuck it, I switch to Rust. I get tired of lifetimes and wrapping everything in RefCells so I switch to Erlang. Erlang is cool and all, but no fucking meta programming. Sucks, let’s try Lisp...<p>I am not making fast progress, I think the problem is my keyboard, I should try buying that Ducky one I have been eyeing for quite a while.

Over and over again I keep hearing the advice to &quot;build using what you know.&quot;<p>How do I separate what might be a side project to learn a new stack from a side project that might eventually make money?

C++&#x2F;Qt for GUI, Go or Python for backend, Python for misc scripts&#x2F;prototypes, C for uCs. They are all well trodden paths with plenty of good libraries available, and good tooling available. I have spent a bit of time playing with Zig most recently, it could finally replace C for me!

Web: typescript frontend and phoenix (Elixir) backend is My new setup.<p>Apps: Flutter and if I need it switch to native. But flutter is really good for my simple needs!

React&#x2F;Redux frontend and .Net Core for backend API. The site takes advantage of Server-Side Rendering and Lazy Loading based on Routes&#x2F;components. Authentication is built into the App with JWT and Authorize attributes on controllers.

I use Go, Vue.js, Postgres, NATS, Redis, Keel, and deploy everything Kubernetes.<p>So far I am super happy with the stack, runs cheaply and requires pretty much no maintenance. Just tag a release on GitHub, Google Cloud Builder builds the image, Keel updates deployments and in a few seconds I have updated production with zero downtime.<p>While some people are happy with their copy&#x2F;paste binaries&#x2F;code to remote servers, I think a good pipeline to release and run your workloads makes working on side projects a lot more pleasure where you can focus on code and features. It also provides you with a valuable experience that can make you more money than the side project itself :)

I’ve a small side project I’m working on. I am writing the backend in Clojure and then deploy with Jenkins using the Groovy DSL — it’s useful that everything runs on the JVM. The Jenkins code calls Terraform to set up the servers, drawing on optimized AMIs I set up with Packer. I avoid Docker for all the reasons I’ve written about elsewhere (you can Google if you’re interested). Packer does everything that people would otherwise use Docker for. For now the frontend is plain HTML and jQuery. I haven’t done the mobile app yet so no need for Angular&#x2F;Cordova or React.

On the backend my API is using node+koa and postgres+postgis. Front end is vue. Koa is amazing, and there&#x27;s a postgis package for knex (a SQL query builder) that lets me do geospatial stuff right in node, which is a game changer. Backend is deployed in containers, Google container registry builds the images for free on every git push and custom bash scripts deploy on the digitalocean instance. Front end is deployed with Netlify, also on the free tier, and also amazing. It&#x27;s incredible how cheap (and mostly free) it is to deploy side projects these days!

Python for control software, C++ for LED drivers, OSC (Open Sound Control) for communication.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kG4xvTjzRwo&amp;t=27s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kG4xvTjzRwo&amp;t=27s</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jZVFdqyaKug" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jZVFdqyaKug</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jdblair&#x2F;MegaPrayer-oscled" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jdblair&#x2F;MegaPrayer-oscled</a>

Django, Postgres RDS on elastic beanstalk, with some SNS use.<p>Vue+vuex on the front end.<p>Gitlab CI&#x2F;CD for deployment<p>Extremely fast dev&#x2F;deployment turnaround time with Django and Beanstalk.<p>Vue&#x2F;vuex is simple enough for me to understand and build SPA

C++, Qt and some OS API.<p>I&#x27;m not in web apps.

Wow, lots of Vue mentioned! I was expecting mostly react, but surprised to see there was actually some pushback against it.<p>&gt; I&#x27;ve heard React described as &quot;10 times as much work for a 20% better user experience&quot;, and I think that&#x27;s about right (maybe not 10x, but probably 2x)<p>I thought this was a gem.

For <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gridgenerator.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gridgenerator.com</a> I am using:<p><pre><code> - Tachyons CSS - InfernoJS - Typescript - Node.js (with express and postgraphile) - PostgreSQL - Nginx - DragonflyBSD</code></pre>

I&#x27;m not sure why people connect success with the language something is written in..?

React + Django hosted on Heroku. Why? Because I&#x27;m most the productive with it.

For my recent projects, I&#x27;ve used Go + DynamoDB for a GraphQL backend, and Next.JS with SSR on the frontend. Deploying both to lambda with Apex Up. Stripe for billing, SendGrid for transactional email.

Elixir, Phoenix and Postgres. I like a lot about Elixir and find it&#x27;s a great solution for many of the soft-realtime apps that I&#x27;ve been building lately.<p>Standing up a CRUD app in Phoenix is dead simple as well.

I haven&#x27;t done an official count (comments plus the site) but a very strong showing for full stack Rails or Django, and when people do stick in a front end it is usually React or Vue.

Thanks for the featuring my side project <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inviewapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inviewapp.com</a> Channing!

Vue.js on the front end with MongoDB Stitch handling authentication and database storage. Deployed to AWS but started using Netlify and loving it.

Firebase suits my needs almost perfectly for projects where I&#x27;d rather focus on the front-end and design than maintaining a back-end, since I&#x27;m only using it for very small apps and sites.<p>Past that, I&#x27;m fond of Node, but that may be an unpopular thing to say on HN. :)

Anyone knows of similar kits&#x2F;packages to Laravel (PHP) and RailsKits (RoR)?<p>Something that will let you focus on creating the part that&#x27;s unique to your project rather than having to build everything (or a lot) from scratch? (Rails&#x2F;Django&#x2F;etc are not enough).

Surprised no ones talking GraphQL with as much coverage as it gets on this site.<p>I’m running my newest solo project on Prisma with GraphQL Yoga as the backend and React + Apollo as the front end. It’s really quite something and allows for extremely quick development.

Python, Django&#x2F;WagtailCMS, React+Redux, Redis and RedisQ, Postgres, Kafka, Docker + Compose for local dev. Visual Studio Code.<p>Tempted to learn a 2nd language well, thinking Go but curious about the experience of Kotlin + IntelliJ

I&#x27;m sticking to standardized languages&#x2F;tech with multiple implementations to keep control and deployment options: JavaScript, C, SQL, HTML and SGML, and Prolog, plus standardized APIs

I&#x27;m using c++17 with Conan and cmake, plus SQlite&#x2F;Qt.<p>I managed to run the deploy using terraform on AWS free tier and Azure msdn account

F# on .NET Core with PostgreSQL, written with JetBrains Rider, running on Ubuntu on AWS.

Swift Vapor + PostgreSQL and you&#x27;re done.

Python and Cython, flask, gunicorn, various ML frameworks, Postgres for web services.<p>Python with Cython because this allows extremely nice flexibility between concise, expressive code and low-level targeted performance optimization.<p>Flask with gunicorn has scaled extremely well for us, but there are many good alternatives. Postgres because flexibility with customizations and data types in the database has been the most important thing for us.