Is there a trusted site that lists the tech stacks used by Indie Hackers?
Hello!
There are SO many tools out there. As a new Indie Hacker, I find my self clicking deep into Twitter threads where people ask what tech stacks are being used by other fellow indie hackers.
So that got me thinking, is there a trusted site that lists many of the various tools used by indie hackers to build their projects? and bonus points how popular they are?
I would love to know what tools people are using for:
- Authn / Authz
- CI / CD
- No code
- Landing pages
- Data storage
etc
If not... I may have found my first idea worth validating! 😊
Trending on Indie Hackers
Yes, I am running one at FounderBeats primarily with this question "Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?"
And yes, this is more around IndieHacker ecosystem.
Thank you for sharing! This is a great starting list. Do you have plans to expand it or allow for it to be interactive at all?
Thankyou. Not for now. I will stay with this format for now.
@coleduclos I would suggest using https://www.wappalyzer.com/. You can search any project here, and it will show all the stacks used in the searched project. I mostly use its Chrome extension when I want to analyze other tools and hunt for new ideas. This tool shows a lot of data that can be helpful.
Yeah was going to recommend the same before saw this comment! It’s a great extension!
Thank you! I’ll check it out.
I’m curious if it somehow can capture user sentiment too? Sure a tool may be used in places, but do people actually enjoy using it?
Closest thing i could think of is https://builtwith.com/ not specific for indie hackers but a nice tool to see what other people use to build their sites
I quickly whipped up an MVP for an Indie Hacker tool website. See the site below.
Do you think something like this would be useful? Would love any feedback!
https://www.hackertools.co/
If you feel a tool is missing, you can sign up / log in and suggest a tool.
Based on the comments here:
Let's say this didn't get added as part of indiehackers.com, and let's say instead there was a site like this, for instance called indietechstack.com. Suppose it was super easy to add a project/product, and list its tech components (lots of auto-complete and so on to make it fast). Suppose it even offered the option to automatically make an architecture diagram for your solution based on the tech items you've listed. And say it was searchable by lots of fields, such as "python" or "no-code", or other keywords like "AWS", "severless", "Chat-GPT", "medical", and so on. Furthermore, suppose there was a way for the creator to state the one-time or monthly cost of the individual technologies, and say how many users are being supported by that cost. Furthermore, suppose that it was easy for the creator to add annotations about individual technologies, for instance, "this was absolutely key", "this is okay but it's not really worth the price", and so on. And suppose there were ways for viewers to add short comments, such as a recommendation for a better or cheaper tool, or ask for details about the creator's experience with a technology.
I can imagine that lots of indie hackers would be interested in this if there were lots of data. The user could search for a product more or less similar to what they want to build, and see how much it costs to run, how much coding experience is necessary, and so on.
But what motivates someone to add a page enumerating their technology? Here are some potential reasons, but I don't know if any of them seem realistic. Let me know what you think:
(1) You just love sharing and supporting the indie hacker community.
(2) Similar to the last: You are building in public, so this tool is a convenient way to share the technical side of your project.
(3) You want feedback on your tech stack. Perhaps people know better tools you should be using.
(4) You are the creator of a certain tool and you want to show off a project using the tool to make people aware of what it can do.
(5) You think the automatic architecture diagram function sounds cool and you want to see it make a diagram of your architecture.
Any others?
Overall do you think there would be enough people adding project pages to this site to make it a valuable source for wannabe indie hackers?
Thank you for the thoughtful response.
People love sharing their ideas and supporting the community. At least that seems to be the case on twitter! If you search "#buildinpublic tech stack" you'll see plenty of threads like this. So I think the motivation is there.
I would participate in a tool like this. Would you?
If incentive truly is challenging, perhaps we could come up with a model that financially incentivized people for sharing?
Yes, I personally would create project tech stack pages on such a site because I would be interested in people commenting and suggesting alternatives.
Yes, I started thinking about indietechstack.com because I noticed that whenever tech stack information is shared on indiehackers.com it seems like lots of people want to jump in with their opinions and questions. I myself would use it to browse stacks when starting a new project, especially one like I'm doing now that involves HIPAA compliance -- I spent a lot of time researching that perhaps could have been saved if I had a few similar stacks to study.
Anyway, I was working on an MVP for indietechstack.com but I stopped because I lost faith that if I built it they would come. I wasn't able to think of incentives I believed in for people to document their stacks. A buy me a coffee link? A discount on some of the tools you use? A reputation system? A cheapskate award (most users served for least amount of money)? :)
By the way, you can check out https://hackerstack.io/, which unfortunately doesn't do most of the things that my hypothetical indietechstack.com does, as described above. There's also stackshare.io. It has a bit of pros/cons discussion of tools, but that's mostly from large companies, not very relevant to indie hackers.
Just curious, though. Isn't it more secure not to publish your tech stack? Aren't you just giving away more information than necessary? if you announce all the tech that's used, aren't you just advertising that your site may become susceptible to (future) exploits in that tech?
Security through obscurity is not really a good strategy to keep your services safe. You must always assume that a potential attacker will get to know the tools you are using (because they will). If you are afraid of beeing victim of a exploit in a dependecy of your project i would instead focus my efforts on adding tools to monitor and notify you when such exploits are found
Completely agree with this. Obscurity doesn't lead to security...
But on the other hand, why tell everyone you're hiding your key under the flowerpot by the front door?
I agree with @kalmar. Building in public can be scary for those reasons.. but can also strengthen your projects even more so. It’s similar to using open source software. I tend to think open source software (when done correctly) tends to be more secure because of its transparency and so many well intended users guiding it. It has to be secure to reach success .
That being said, what if this product was a simple list of tools where you could upvote or downvote based on your experience with them? Would not be tied to your particular product(s).
I would definitely use something like this if it had most used stacks, most used stacks by top 1% sites etc
been looking for the same. keyword trusted
would love it if the IH product page included the tech stack
there is this on IH for no code (no idea of trust factor) https://www.indiehackers.com/product/whichnocodetool
Agreed, would be nice to list this kind of stuff on IH! I’ll check out the no-code post. Thanks for the link!