less than 1 minute read

I wanted to build needvault.com using the leanest tech stack possible. Here’s what I used and why:

  1. Next.js — A widely adopted framework supported by many free hosting providers. It offers advantages like server-side rendering for better SEO and performance boosts through static site generation.

  2. Netlify — A platform that provides free, serverless hosting for Next.js sites. It automatically converts API routes into edge functions and gives you over 100K invocations and 100GB of bandwidth per month. Pretty generous. I considered Vercel, but their $14/month minimum for commercial sites pushed me toward Netlify.

  3. Clerk — Manages authentication and user accounts. Since I don’t use a database, I actually store all necessary user data in Clerk. (See Database not required.)

  4. Stripe — For handling payments.

So far, the site’s been running great for the unbeatable price of $0/month. The only downside is a bit of latency: UptimeRobot reports response times between 300–400ms. But beggars can’t be choosers (hopefully it’s not my code…).

Updated:

Posted: