The Founder Toolstack — 2026 Edition
The curated stack we recommend for a pre-seed to seed-stage team in 2026 — opinionated, with reasoning.
EE
Published 4w agoUpdated 2d ago 1,959
The opinionated stack. Switch anything if you have a strong reason; the defaults are what we'd pick today.
Engineering
- Hosting: Vercel (Next.js) / Fly.io (Rails/Django) / Hetzner + Coolify (self-managed).
- DB: Supabase (Postgres + auth) for most.
- Auth: NextAuth or Clerk depending on stack maturity.
- Object storage: Cloudflare R2.
Communication
- Async: Slack. Use threads, mute channels, default to written.
- Sync: Cal.com for booking. Loom for context.
Product
- Backlog: Linear.
- Docs: Notion.
- Customer insights: Dovetail (or just a shared doc until 20 customers).
Revenue & finance
- Payments: Stripe.
- Accounting: Pilot (US) or Xero (rest of world).
- Banking: Mercury (US) or Wise (international).
What we cut
- Calendar tools beyond Cal.com.
- Project tools beyond Linear.
- Analytics tools beyond Plausible until you need cohort analysis.
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