Honest tooling for solo builders
No sponsored rankings, no SEO slop. Just hands-on comparisons of the tools indie hackers actually use to ship — written by someone who has shipped on them.
Pick Stripe for the lowest fees and most control if you can handle global tax (yourself or with a tax tool); pick a merchant of record like Paddle or Lemon Squeezy when you want to sell worldwide without ever touching VAT.
Railway is the best all-around host for a solo founder shipping a small full-stack app, with Render as the close runner-up if you want a predictable monthly fee instead of metered usage.
Stripe vs Lemon Squeezy vs Paddle for solo SaaS in 2026: merchant of record vs not, real fees, who handles VAT, and which to actually pick.
A 2026 hands-on comparison of Fly.io, Railway, Render, and Vercel for deploying a small Flask API, Next.js frontend, and Postgres on a budget.
Resend vs Postmark vs Mailgun for transactional email in 2026: June-2026 pricing, deliverability, React Email DX, domain auth, and EU residency compared.
Cloudflare vs Porkbun vs Namecheap for indie hackers in 2026: true renewal pricing, free WHOIS privacy, transfer lock-in, and which registrar to actually use.
Supabase vs Neon vs PlanetScale for a solo SaaS or side project in 2026: free tiers, Postgres vs MySQL, branching, scale-to-zero, and pricing as you grow.