Stack

Choice: Turborepo, Next.js 16, tRPC, Prisma 7.10.1 (pinned), Postgres, Playwright, Better Auth, the table queue. Staging is free: Vercel Hobby, the worker on the owner's machine, Neon Free, Cloudflare R2, Resend Free + React Email, Polar sandbox, Sentry Free. Production waits for the first customer, then one small server for web and worker (Oracle Cloud Always Free in India, else OVHcloud Mumbai, about ₹586 a month). Payments: Polar as merchant of record. Accessibility: @axe-core/playwright. Editor: real HTML in an iframe with our own overlay; @xyflow/react for Journey; our own three-way merge. Presence: a Postgres heartbeat. Full picture: architecture-overview.

Why: the smallest battle-tested set; own code only where it is the product.

Rejected: Docker Compose on one server for staging · Amazon SES · Lighthouse · Crawlee · hosted browsers (role passwords leave us) · tldraw, Konva, Fabric (cannot lay out real CSS) · Yjs, Automerge, Loro · Liveblocks, Ably, Pusher · Stripe (no Indian individuals) · Paddle · Lemon Squeezy · pg-boss, Inngest, Trigger.dev · Mitosis · Style Dictionary · AI SDK + Gateway.