Every tool, and why it's here.
A logo wall proves nothing. What matters is whether someone can tell you why a thing is on the list, and what they refuse to use. So here is both.
Interface
What the customer or the crew touches.
- Astro Pages arrive already built, so they load fast and there is nothing to crash. This site runs on it.
- Next.js When a build needs a server and per-request rendering.
- TypeScript The cheapest bug prevention there is.
- React For the handful of screens that are really applications.
- Svelte When the interface is small and the bundle should be too.
- Tailwind On team projects, where a shared vocabulary beats taste.
Data
One record of truth, in a shape something else can read.
- Postgres The default. Boring, proven, and it will outlive the project.
- SQLite Small operations don't need a database server, and pay less for skipping it.
- Supabase Postgres with auth and storage attached, when speed matters more than control.
- Prisma Schema in one place, migrations that are reviewable.
- Redis Queues, rate limits, and anything that should not touch the database.
Intelligence
Used where it earns its keep, not sprinkled on for the pitch.
- Claude Reasoning, extraction, and anything that has to be defensible.
- GPT Second opinion, and cheaper classification at volume.
- Embeddings So an assistant answers from your documents, not from whatever it read in training.
- Vector search So the answer points at a source you can go and read.
- Reading scanned paper A photo of a delivery note becomes a record. The technical name is OCR.
- Whisper Voicemail and call notes into text, then into your CRM.
Money
Take payment without renting your margin to a platform.
- Stripe Your account, your rates, your payout schedule.
- Shopify headless When the catalog belongs there but the storefront doesn't.
- Tax engines Because guessing at nexus is how businesses get letters.
- Xero / QuickBooks Posting to the ledger you already reconcile against.
Infrastructure
In your name, on your card, portable on the day you leave.
- Netlify Hosting, forms, and deploys that roll back in one command.
- Cloudflare DNS, caching, and workers at the edge.
- Railway / Fly For the parts that need to be a long-running process.
- S3-compatible storage Files that don't leave with a vendor.
- GitHub Your repository, from the first commit.
Keeping it honest
The unglamorous half that decides whether it still works in a year.
- Playwright Every demo on this site was verified with it, not eyeballed.
- Sentry You hear about the error before the customer calls.
- Resend / Postmark Transactional mail that reaches the inbox.
- Structured logging So a question about last Tuesday has an answer.
- Uptime checks Alerts to a phone, not a dashboard nobody opens.
What we won't build on.
The list a studio refuses is more informative than the list it advertises.
- Page builders Whatever is quick to drag together is slow to change and impossible to hand over.
- Purchased themes You would be buying the same site four competitors already bought.
- Plugin stacks Twenty plugins is twenty vendors who can break your site on their schedule.
- Proprietary lock-in If leaving is expensive, the work has to be good. Ours should have to be.
None of this is the point.
You aren't buying a stack, you're buying a thing that works. The tools are chosen per project, and if the honest answer is that you need none of them, you'll get that answer on the first call.
Start a project