How we pick

We pick on fit, not payout

A tool makes it into a recipe because it's the best fit for that stage of that kind of project: how fast you can get started, how much it costs, and how painful it is to outgrow. Whether a tool has an affiliate program never decides a pick. Many of our defaults (Supabase, Vercel, Cloudflare, Stripe, Claude Code) pay us nothing.

Prices come from official pricing pages

Every cost links to the tool's official pricing page and shows a last-verified date.
We never invent prices. Where a cost depends on usage (LLM tokens, emails, compute), the cost note states the assumption.
Monthly totals cover fixed and assumed-usage costs. Payment transaction fees (a percentage of your revenue) and one-time fees are listed separately.
If we can't verify a price, we say so.

Three splits, clear triggers

Each recipe has three stages: Day one, ~100 users and ~1,000 users. Each stage ends with "switch when…" triggers, the concrete signs that it's time to move on, so you don't over-engineer on day one or stay on a free tier too long.

Affiliate disclosure

Some tools we recommend have affiliate or referral programs. They're marked aff. program. Today, every link on this site goes to the plain official website. If we start using affiliate links, each one will be labeled aff. link and marked rel="sponsored". We may earn a commission when you sign up through one, at no extra cost to you. Affiliate status never changes a pick, a price or the order of recommendations.

Privacy

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Corrections