For shipping something real in two days
The weekend MVP stack
Five dashboards, one weekend, a real product that can charge money by Sunday night.
This is the boring-on-purpose stack: every layer is best-in-class for its one job, has a real free tier, and is designed to plug straight into the others with near-zero glue code. Just as important for vibe coding — the AI writing your code has seen these exact combinations a million times, so it hallucinates less and gets the integration right the first time. You spend the weekend building your actual idea, not fighting config.
The stack
- FrameworkNext.js ↗Frontend and backend in one codebase, one deploy, one mental model — no separate API server to stand up.
- Styling & UITailwind CSS ↗Copy-paste accessible components you own outright, so you never build a design system or npm-install a bloated UI kit.
- AuthClerk ↗Drop-in <SignIn/> components mean real login, sessions, and social auth are done in minutes, not a day.
- DatabaseSupabaseA managed Postgres plus file storage with a generous free tier — a real relational DB, no toy KV store you'll regret.
- ORM / DB accessDrizzle ORMTypesafe queries and dead-simple migrations with no heavy codegen step slowing your inner loop.
- PaymentsStripeThe only real choice; a hosted Checkout link gets you taking money in an afternoon.
- Transactional emailResendSend receipts and magic links in three lines, and author them as React components with React Email.
- HostingVercelGit push to ship, automatic preview URLs per branch, and zero config because it's built by the Next.js team.
Tradeoffs
- Account sprawl: you'll juggle five dashboards and a wall of API keys (Vercel, Supabase, Clerk, Stripe, Resend). More to wire up and more secrets to keep out of git than a single monolith.
- Auth overlap you're paying for: Supabase already ships auth, so bolting on Clerk is redundant. You're buying better drop-in DX with a second bill — swap to Supabase Auth if you want one fewer vendor.
- All-in on serverless and the Vercel/Next ecosystem: great for request/response apps, bad for long-running jobs, heavy background processing, or websocket-heavy workloads. Those need a different shape.
- Cheap per-service adds up: each free tier is generous alone, but Vercel bandwidth, Supabase, Clerk MAU, and Stripe fees compound once you actually get traction.
Cost
$0 to start — every layer has a real free tier. Realistically ~$45/mo once you outgrow them (Vercel Pro $20 + Supabase Pro $25; Clerk stays free under 10k monthly users), plus Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢ per charge.