Technologies I use to build my SaaS

Hello fellow creators 👋

Quick intro about me: I'm a [Indie Hacker]， creator of Paste Image — a dead-simple clipboard image uploader that hit 12K monthly users with zero marketing budget.

I also built [Aesthetic Emojis] and a few others that didn't see the daylight.

Speed is everything in indie hacking. The gap between "I have an idea" and "it's live" should be measured in days, not weeks. Your toolstack either enables that speed or kills it.

Here's what I actually use to ship:

Product Building

Hosting platform — Vercel (preferred), Cloudflare Pages

• Vercel for Next.js projects, Cloudflare for static sites. Both have generous free tiers and global CDN.

Technology — Next.js with App Router (preferred), vanilla JS for micro-tools

• Paste Image is built with vanilla JS. No framework overhead, loads in 0.8s. Sometimes simpler is faster.

Database — None for Paste Image (static JSON), PostgreSQL when I need persistence

• Not every project needs a backend. Paste Image stores nothing server-side. Zero database costs, zero latency.

Storage — Cloudflare R2

• S3-compatible, zero egress fees. Hosts all uploaded images for pennies.

Error Notification — Sentry (free tier)

• Catches edge cases I miss. Mostly clipboard permission errors on mobile browsers.

UI Template — ShipFast (preferred), Tailwind UI

• For Paste Image, I designed in Figma and built from scratch. Took 2 hours. Speed > polish for MVPs.

Styling — Tailwind CSS

• Non-negotiable. I write CSS once every few months, and it's usually !important hacks on legacy projects.

Authentication — None for Paste Image, Clerk when I need auth

• Intentionally left out. One less barrier to use. 40% of users are one-time visitors who just want to share a screenshot quickly.

Marketing

Logo & Design — Canva, Iconify

• Paste Image logo took 10 minutes in Canva. Good enough is better than perfect.

Design tool — Figma

• Wireframe → prototype → export assets. One tool.

Places to promote — Indie Hackers, Twitter, Reddit (r/webdev, r/SideProject)

• Reddit drove my first 1K users. Indie Hackers gave me quality feedback, not just traffic.

Testimonials — TweetPik (screenshot tweets), manual embeds

• No fancy tool. Just screenshot nice tweets and add them to the landing page.

Video casts — OBS + CleanShot

• Free, fast, good enough.

Email Integration — Resend (preferred), SendGrid

• Resend's developer experience is unmatched. SMTP in 2 minutes.

Analytics & Others

Analytics — Plausible (self-hosted), Vercel Analytics

• Plausible for privacy-friendly stats. No cookie banner needed. 1KB script.

Payment Integration — Stripe (when I add Pro tier)

• Currently free with ads. Pro tier coming with custom domains and team features.

The philosophy

Paste Image runs on $5/month (VPS for Plausible). Everything else is free tier.

I see devs spinning up Kubernetes clusters for side projects. Don't. Start static, stay lean, add complexity only when revenue justifies it.

My stack has friction — I still Google Tailwind classes daily. But it's familiar enough that I can ship a working product in a weekend. That's the goal.

What are your go-to tools for Building, Marketing & Analytics?

Especially curious about cheap/free storage alternatives and marketing channels that worked for your dev tools.