🛠️ Every single important tool I've used to build Tiiny Host

I receive a lot of questions about the tools/services I've used to build tiiny.host. So I wanted to list them all here and why.

The important thing that I've realised on my journey so far is that there are several critical tools that you should definitely install from launch that greatly improve your journey. It's not just about your app.

💬 Crisp Chat - IM Support (Highly Recommended)

Price: Free
Why: It's completely free on the lite plan compared with Intercom. I should have installed this from launch. It's done wonders for my feedback cycle and answering customer questions just before they upgrade. 30-40% of subscription conversions have begun with an in-bound Crisp chat.

🍯 HotJar - UX analytics (High Recommended)

Price: Free
Why: I only installed this last week, but again should have installed it very early on. HotJar provides live video replays of visitors of your site along with heatmaps. It's incredible for discovering where users are getting stuck in your app and optimising your flows. I've already made a dozen changes based on the data and see improved experiences.

📈 Google Analytics - General analytics

Price: Free
Why: I wanted something reliable & free with a great mobile app. There's definitely better tools out there for this but I liked to check stats on my phone. It's also incredibly simple to set up and powerful out the box

📧 Gsuite - Email

Price: $5 p/m
Why: Another reliable, tried & tested email solution. You can also just pay for one email account like tom@mydomain.com and set up alias emails that all forward to your main inbox e.g. support@mydomain.com, hello@mydomain.com for no extra cost.

📤 Nodemailer + SES - Email marketing

Price: Free
Why: I wanted a free and tight integration for emails with my product. This isn't for everyone but the cost is basically negligible here. SES charge you $0 for the first 62,000 emails you send each month from an EC2 server.

💰 Stripe - Payments

Price: 2.9% + 20p per transaction
Why: I previously launched with Gumroad but a few weeks ago they unfairly suspended my account and withheld all of the funds (very annoyed by this - but for another post). Anyway, I managed to set up Stripe in a weekend and its working smoothly since. It's definitely more complex to set up but I think you really want a very reliable platform to handle this critical component.

🔒 Google reCAPTCHA v3 - Spam protection

Price: Free
Why: My product particularly suffers from a lot of spam because of its low barriers to entry. reCAPTCHA v3 allows me to prevent anyone from spamming my APIs - you can now only call them from a browser. Google also scores the request so you can block any dodgy calls. It's also completely invisible to the user unlike the previous reCAPTCHA where you have find the all the pots of gold in a rainbow or something.

🖥️ Amazon Web Services - Platform hosting

Price: $20 p/m
Why: Whilst I don't think this route is for everyone, I am very familiar with AWS and it gives be practically unlimited flexibility with regards to the what I want to build. Services I use: S3, Cloudfront, EC2, Dynamo. They're also super cheap at low usage (and as you scale depending on how you architect).

👨‍💻️ React & Node - Frontend / Backend

Price: Free
Why: Again, I'm very familiar with the libraries and there's no point in re-inventing the wheel with another library (vue.js, svelte etc). I wanted to focus on the product & shipping.

🌐 NGINX - Routing

Price: Free
Why: tiiny.host subdomain routing is built upon this. Checkout virtual hosts with NGINX for more info on how to host subdomains for your product.

🐞 Sentry - Bug tracking - Free

Price: Free
Why: Because of the rate at which I am shipping and lack of tests this has been critical for understanding if users are dropping because of any issues. It's a one-line installation and instantly emails you if any unexpected errors occur with your product.

How about your product? What do you use? Anything I should add to this list?