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Hey everyone,
I've been thinking about something that keeps coming up.
Choosing tools eats way too much time. You spend days comparing options, reading threads, asking around. Then you just pick something because you need to start building.
The thing is, most tool advice misses the point. It doesn't account for where you actually are.
I've been building Quick Brander and a few other products over the last two years. After watching people launch and talking to other founders, I noticed a pattern. Your stage matters more than the "best" tool.
There are basically three phases as you grow from zero to around ten thousand in monthly revenue.
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Stage 1: Pre-Revenue → $0-$50/mo Stage 2: Early Growth → $200-$500/mo Stage 3: Scaling → $800-$1,500/mo |
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When you're validating
You're testing if anyone cares about what you're building. Use tools with actual free tiers, not trial periods that expire in two weeks.
At this stage, your tools should cost almost nothing. Maybe fifty dollars total per month. Save money for things that matter more, like testing your idea or getting feedback.
Vercel works for hosting. Supabase handles your database. Resend takes care of emails. All free until you actually need more.
The mistake is paying too early. Infrastructure spending before you have customers is just burning money.
When you get your first customers
Everything changes once people start paying you.
Your free tools hit limits. Database caps out. Emails start bouncing. Monitoring fails during actual outages. Your support tool maxes at ten tickets and you have twenty.
This is when you upgrade the stuff customers actually touch. Hosting reliability matters now. Email delivery cannot fail. Your database needs to stay up during checkout.
But internal tools can wait. Project management and team chat still work fine on free plans. Spend where it protects revenue.
Budget goes from fifty to maybe two hundred to five hundred monthly. Sounds like a lot, but one hour of downtime costs more than a month of proper hosting.
When you're actually running a business
Around five to ten thousand monthly revenue, you need real infrastructure.
Tools that don't break at night. Support teams that respond in hours. Systems that handle traffic without you babysitting servers at midnight. Team features because you finally hired someone.
But you're not an enterprise yet. Skip the fancy features you don't need. No dedicated account managers or custom contracts. Just reliable tools that work.
Budget sits around eight hundred to fifteen hundred monthly. Proper monitoring, real support software, team tools, infrastructure with uptime guarantees.
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What I built for you
I mapped this all out in a spreadsheet. Twenty-two tool categories across all three stages.
For each tool, I included the actual free tier limits (not vague marketing speak), real pricing from this month, specific moments when you should upgrade, alternatives, and honest takes on what actually works.
Most guides are written for funded companies pulling in fifty thousand monthly. This one is for bootstrapped founders counting dollars.
You'll save about twenty hours of research and probably a few hundred dollars monthly on tools you don't need yet.
The resource pack - Startup Tech Stack 2026
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I mapped all of this in a spreadsheet. Three stages, twenty-two tool categories, real pricing, upgrade triggers, honest takes.
Clone it, use it, share it with your team. |
Use it however you want. If you spot a better tool I missed, let me know and I'll add it.
That's it. Pick tools that work for your stage. Start building. Adjust when things change.
The goal is finding good tools fast so you can get back to building what people pay for.
Pick your stack. Start building. Adjust when you need to.
That is how you actually ship.
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