Railway for all-in-one, Supabase for DB-heavy

• Railway: Easiest full-stack, great DX, good pricing.
• Supabase: Best if you need powerful DB + auth.
• Fly: Best global latency, for serious apps.
• Render: Simpler, good for traditional apps.

Drizzle for performance, Prisma for ease

ORM comparison:

• Prisma: Easiest to use, great DX, but heavier and slower at scale.
• Drizzle: Lightweight, near-native performance, SQL-like syntax. Rising fast.
• SQLAlchemy: Python thing, not great TypeScript support.

My pick: Drizzle for new TS projects. Prisma if you need speed of development.

n8n for self-hosted, Zapier for ease

Used all three:

• Zapier: Easiest, most integrations, but expensive. Good for simple automations.
• n8n: Open source, cheap self-hosted, powerful. Steeper learning curve but worth it.
• Make: Middle ground, good visual workflow builder, better pricing than Zapier.

My pick: n8n for control, Zapier for speed.

Obsidian for power users, Notion for teams

Using all three for different purposes:

• Obsidian: Local-first, best backlinks, highly customizable with plugins. The graph view is amazing for connecting ideas.
• Notion: Best for collaboration, all-in-one workspace. But privacy concerns and subscription costs.
• LogSeq: Open source, outline-based, great for hierarchical thinking. Still maturing but promising.

My choice for second brain: Obsidian – the graph alone is worth it.

Cloudflare Pages for value, Vercel for DX

Here’s my breakdown after using all three:

• Vercel: Best developer experience, instant deploys, great analytics. But gets expensive fast with bandwidth.
• Netlify: Solid features, good form handling, edge functions. Middle ground on pricing.
• Cloudflare Pages: Basically free for most sites, fast on Cloudflare network. But fewer features than Vercel.

My pick: Cloudflare Pages for personal projects, Vercel for client work.

Perplexity for research, ChatGPT for deeper analysis

Been using both for market research at my startup. Here’s my take:

• Perplexity: Best for quick research + source gathering. It cites sources which is HUGE for verifying info. Great for “what are the top competitors in X” type questions.
• ChatGPT: Better for synthesis and deeper reasoning. When I need to analyze findings, draw conclusions, or brainstorm strategies.

My workflow: Start with Perplexity to gather data, then switch to ChatGPT to analyze and summarize.

Worth the Pro subscription? Yes if you do research regularly.

GitHub Actions for most teams

Here’s my take after setting up CI/CD for 10+ startups:

• GitHub Actions: Best if you’re already on GitHub. Good enough for most cases, generous free tier. Minutes limit is real but manageable.
• CircleCI: Fastest builds, best caching. Worth the price if speed = money for you.
• GitLab CI: Great if you also use GitLab repos. The integrated approach is nice.

Verdict: Start with GitHub Actions, upgrade to CircleCI if you hit performance bottlenecks.

As a non-US founder selling globally, Paddle saved my sanity.

The extra 2% is worth not getting into legal trouble with tax authorities in 30+ countries.

Also: they handle chargebacks and refunds too. Set and forget.

linear is like apple products. expensive but it just works. clickup has too many features i never use.