02Starter stacks
Pick a lane.
Don’t mix edu licenses into prod.
Three opinionated defaults. Swap pieces freely — just watch the commercial chip on each tool.
01
Student · $0 learning
Schoolwork and side projects. Mix Pack unlocks with forever-free SaaS.
- Editor
- JetBrains + Copilot
- Host
- Cloudflare Pages or burn DO/Azure credits
- DB
- Neon or Turso free
- Auth
- Clerk / Kinde free
- Design
- Figma Education
- CAD / numerics
- Autodesk Edu + MATLAB Online
- Observe
- Sentry (Pack) + PostHog free
- Secrets
- Doppler (Pack)
- Domain
- Namecheap .me when ready
02
Not a student / alumni · $0–low
No school email. Lean on forever free tiers and Always Free VMs.
- Editor
- VS Code + Copilot paid, or Cursor Hobby
- Host
- Cloudflare / Render / Koyeb
- DB
- Neon + Upstash
- Auth
- Clerk free
- Design
- Figma Starter
- Storage
- Cloudflare R2
- Resend free
- Observe
- PostHog + Sentry free
- VMs
- Oracle Always Free
03
Student shipping a real product
Commercial-OK free tiers for prod. Edu licenses stay on coursework.
- Host
- Cloudflare / Koyeb — not Vercel Hobby
- DB
- Neon / Turso / Supabase free
- Auth
- Clerk / Kinde
- Resend
- Jobs
- Inngest
- Storage
- R2 (zero egress)
- IDE
- Buy JetBrains commercial when money lands
- Design
- Figma paid seat for client work
04
Startup / tech-adjacent lean
Company or serious side-revenue. Meter AI. Claim Activate when real.
- Narrative
- See /guides/startup
- Edge
- Cloudflare Pages + Workers
- Data
- Neon + R2 + PostHog
- Auth / email
- Clerk + Resend
- LLM
- Ollama/Groq/Gemini for bulk · OpenRouter gateway
- LLM ops
- Langfuse or Helicone before first demo
- Search
- Meilisearch/Typesense self-host or free cloud
- Security
- Turnstile + Gitleaks in CI + Tailscale for admin
- Credits
- AWS Activate / Google for Startups
- Sell globally
- Lemon Squeezy or Paddle (MoR)