Honest writeups of the tools we and our engineers use daily: IDEs, AI assistants, hosting, auth, billing, monitoring, and what we'd swap out.
The best customer support tool for your SaaS depends on three things: who your buyer is (B2C, prosumer, or B2B), how many tickets you handle a week, and whether your team lives in Slack or in a help-d
The best CRM for an early-stage startup in 2026 is the cheapest one your team actually opens every day. For most founders, that means a spreadsheet under 50 contacts, Folk or HubSpot Free for a 2-to-5
Planetscale in 2026 is the right MySQL host for one specific shop: a high-write, schema-changes-weekly product team that has internalized the no-foreign-keys discipline and can absorb the $99-and-up m
The best analytics tools for SaaS in 2026 are PostHog for product analytics if you have engineers, Amplitude if you don't, Plausible for web traffic, ChartMogul for revenue analytics under $10K MRR, a
Render is the right hosting platform for most early-stage startups shipping a Node, Python, or Go backend with a Postgres database, and it stops being the right choice the moment you need real-time We
The best AI coding tools for senior engineers in 2026 are Claude Code for autonomous task work, Cursor for in-IDE flow, CodeRabbit for code review, Codium for tests, and Ghostty plus Warp for the term
After six months of running Cursor across three production codebases, the verdict is simple: keep it for daily writing, throttle it for review, and do not let it touch your migrations. It earns its $2
Linear is the right issue tracker for almost every engineering team under 50 people that ships software weekly, and the wrong one for almost every cross-functional org that needs custom fields, approv
Supabase is the right backend for most SaaS apps shipping in 2026, until you hit complex B2B permissions, SSO/SCIM requirements, or analytics workloads that outgrow a single Postgres. Below is the hon
The best Stripe alternatives in 2026 are Paddle and Lemon Squeezy (for SaaS that wants tax compliance handled), Adyen (for $1M+/month volume), Braintree (for PayPal-native markets), GoCardless (for ba
Vercel in 2026 is the right hosting choice for most Next.js startups, and the wrong choice for almost everyone else. The base $20/seat/month Pro plan is fair; the unbounded usage billing on top of it
The best AI transcription service in 2026 depends on what you are actually doing. If you need to transcribe meetings, use **Otter** or **Fireflies**. If you need polished audio and video edits, use **
Vercel is cheap until you hit one of three numbers: 1TB of monthly bandwidth, 10 million edge requests, or your fifth developer seat. Cross any of them and your bill jumps from $20 a month to $200 or
The best headless CMS for a marketing site in 2026 depends on shape, not vibes. Sanity wins for content-heavy sites with structured editorial. Storyblok wins when non-technical marketers need to drag,
Cursor IDE is worth paying for if you live in a code editor and ship features every day; it remains the strongest in-IDE AI experience in 2026, and senior engineers will extract more from it than juni
Yes, for most working developers, GitHub Copilot is still worth $20 a month in 2026. But it is no longer the best AI coding tool, and for anyone doing agentic, multi-file, or refactor-heavy work, Curs