The best MVP toolkit is the one that gets out of your way. You're not choosing infrastructure for a ten-engineer team in eighteen months — you're choosing what lets you ship a working product this weekend, charge real money for it next week, and not think about the plumbing again until it actually breaks. That constraint rules out a lot of "best practice" advice written for a different stage of company.
Here's the stack that shows up again and again in fast-shipping solo and two-person teams, what each piece actually does, and where it's worth swapping.
The constraint that defines an MVP stack
Every choice below optimizes for the same three things, in order:
- Time to first deploy. If a tool needs a config file, an infra ticket, or a call with sales before you can use it, it's the wrong tool for an MVP.
- Usage-based pricing. You want to pay near-$0 at zero users and scale the bill with revenue, not commit to a seat count or a reserved-capacity tier up front.
- One person can operate it. No dedicated DBA, no on-call rotation, no dashboard that only makes sense with a platform team behind it.
Hosting and frontend: Vercel
For anything built on Next.js, React, or most modern frontend frameworks, Vercel
is the default for a reason: git push is the entire deploy pipeline, every PR gets a preview
URL for free, and the free tier covers a real MVP's traffic. Cloudflare Pages is the closest
alternative if you want to standardize on Cloudflare for everything (Workers, R2, D1) instead —
also a legitimate choice, just a different center of gravity for the rest of your stack.
Database and auth: Supabase
Supabase is a hosted Postgres database with auth, storage, and row-level-security policies built in, which matters more than it sounds like: it means "add login" and "add a file upload" don't turn into separate vendor integrations. You get a real SQL database from day one instead of a NoSQL store you'll regret querying in six months, and the free tier is generous enough to run an MVP's actual database on.
Firebase is the other well-known option here — faster for pure-NoSQL, real-time-heavy apps, slower to love if you ever need a relational query.
Payments: Stripe, or a Merchant of Record
Stripe is still the default for payments infrastructure, but it leaves sales tax and VAT compliance to you as you sell into more countries. If that's a headache you'd rather not own yet, a Merchant of Record like Paddle or Lemon Squeezy handles tax collection and remittance for you at the cost of a larger cut per transaction — we cover that trade-off in detail in our Merchant of Record comparison.
Error tracking: Sentry
An MVP without error tracking means your first signal that something's broken is a support email — or silence, which is worse. Sentry's free tier catches unhandled exceptions on day one, and the setup is a single SDK install, not an infra project.
Transactional email: Resend
Password resets, receipts, and "your export is ready" emails need to land in the inbox, not the spam folder. Resend is built for exactly this — a clean API, good deliverability defaults, and a free tier that covers an MVP's volume without needing to warm up your own sending domain reputation from scratch.
AI features: OpenAI or Anthropic
If your MVP has an AI feature at its core rather than as a bolt-on, both OpenAI and Anthropic offer pay-per-token APIs with no minimum commitment — genuinely MVP-shaped pricing. Pick based on the task: reasoning-heavy or long-context work tends to favor Claude models, high-throughput simple completions are often cheaper on GPT models. Test both against your actual prompts before committing.
What this stack costs at MVP scale
Run the numbers at, say, a few hundred users and a few thousand database rows, and the honest answer is: close to $0 outside of your domain name. Vercel, Supabase, Sentry, and Resend all have free tiers built for exactly this stage. Stripe and AI APIs are usage-based, so they only start costing real money once you're making real money — which is the entire point of choosing tools this way.
The part nobody puts in the toolkit list
Once Vercel is deploying, Supabase is storing rows, Stripe is charging cards, and Sentry is catching exceptions, you now have four dashboards to check instead of one — and that's before you ship a second product. That's the exact gap FounderOS exists to close: connect the services you already picked, in under three minutes each, and get one Today view across all of them instead of a morning routine of tab-switching.