How to choose a tech stack for my web application? Cashback.

The one you know how to code in.

Hi Lopas!

If you're promoting other companies' products, you should see if they have prebuilt affiliate links. That's what I do on startyourblog.co. This means that you would only need to build a simple WordPress site (or static site, or Squarespace, or whatever you're comfortable with) instead of spending months building a whole backend system. You can use WordPress plugins if you need it to be a membership site that lets people log in.

However, if you need to make a custom platform, I'd recommend building the backend in a language you already know how to code in. JavaScript = Node, Ruby = Rails, PHP = Laravel.

For the frontend, choose something like React or Vue. I've done a lot of catalogue building with React, it would be my first choice for a project like this. Componentization is your friend.

If you are new to all of this, take a look at the simple stack in Michael's comment and go from there. You might be able to follow along with some YouTube tutorials to get started.

Choose a framework that you know, in order to be fast and efficient. Alternatively choose a framework that you would like to learn in order to accelerate development of future MVPs.

For the backend I would strongly recommend Django. One of the main benefits I found for me was that it comes in with an admin panel.

Consider Laravel Spark. Perfect start for any project.

It depends what you're comfortable with, here's some stacks you can do:

Front End:

• Typescript
• React/Vue
• Vanilla JS

Backend:

• PHP (something like Laravel, Codeigniter, Luminance, etc)
• Python (Django or Flask likely)
• Go
• NodeJS

I'd recommend for a simple statck:

• PHP with a framework like the ones listed above

• Vue on the frontend

• Postgresql for database

• Redis for caching

No one has suggested the Microsoft stack?

• Microsoft SQL Server
• ASP.NET
• C#
• HTML/CSS/JavaScript
• TypeScript

Go with what you know. you customers don't care about your stake

All good thoughts in the comments! I'll throw in a bit of promotion for what we've been building out, as it's targeting making building a product like the one you're describing as easy as possible: https://base.run/

Here's a few of the benefits:

• You get a spreadsheet like view of your database that you can access from the web to setup your Schema etc, edit data, and do things manually until you automate them (e.g. you mentioned transaction tracking, payments, api links etc.) - this is especially effective if you're collaborating with some non-technical peeps helping on the manual tasks and don't want to have to build a full admin panel.
• You get a really easy to use SDK: https://base.run/docs/index.html that gives you easy ways to work with your data & build a compelling front-end
• You can easily invite other users to your Bases to collaborate.
• You have built in user authentication: login, signup, forgot-password etc. as well as a supercharged Users table built int.
• You have ability to trigger functions/endpoints when different events happen in your database - and you have a full coding environment to easily write those hosted functions in.
• Our team is around to support, and help you write things you get stuck on to make sure you have a good experience :)

Might be interesting to check out - I'm around if you want to chat more about it at : nicolae@clay.run

Seems like an interesting project! Hope the building goes smoothly 🙌

I would suggest looking into https://firebase.google.com. It's a BaaS (back-end as a service). It basically gives you everything you need so that you can just focus on writing your app. It's free up to a certain amount which is enough to you some growth and sales for paying.

Also it has a ton of hooks for analytics an engagement which you can learn and add as your company grows.

A tech stack should reflect your needs and future plans.

(Although for a technical founder the most familiar stack may be the right answer, as others correctly pointed out in this thread)

Before evaluating the merits of Django vs RoR or Python vs PHP for the backend, it would be wise to understand whether, and to which extent do you actually need "a backend". Likewise, there is no point to debate Vue.js vs React.js if all you need is a couple of HTML pages with a bit of eye candy.

How often will you data change? How many objects (links) there will be typically? How complex is your domain model (e.g. whether each user has their own links or are they shared)? Which parts of the process has to be automated? These kind of questions need to be answered before choosing the tech stack.

From the short description you provided, by far the hardest problem appears to be figuring out payments for the users. It may very well dictate the architecture for the whole thing.

Just about any stack will do. Just pick the one that you're most comfortable with. And if you're adept at all of them, then pick the one that makes your product more scalable and effecient.