| Frontend | Next.js 16+ + React 19 | RSC default, 400% faster dev startup, AI-first tooling, Turbopack maturing |
| Styling | Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui | Fast UI building, professional look out of the box |
| Backend | Next.js API Routes + tRPC | Type-safe APIs, no separate backend needed, Server Actions for simple cases |
| Database | PostgreSQL via Supabase or Neon | Free tier generous, great tooling, edge functions |
| Auth | NextAuth.js v5 (Auth.js) | Easy setup, multiple providers |
| Payments | Stripe | Industry standard, great docs, Stripe Terminal for in-person |
| Hosting | Vercel (simple) or Railway (full-stack) | Easy deploys, auto-scales. NOTE: multi-cloud strategy advised — single-cloud outage risk |
| ORM | Drizzle ORM | Type-safe, lighter than Prisma |
| AI | OpenRouter API | One key, access to all models |
| Runtime | Bun for new projects (v1.3+) | 7x faster installs, built-in image API, HTTP/2+3, production-ready. Node.js LTS for enterprise clients |
| Edge | Cloudflare Workers + D1 + Durable Objects | Most complete edge platform, Deno Deploy for serverless |
| AI Coding | Claude Code | 75% of agentic Vercel deployments, dominant agentic tool |
| AI SDK | Vercel AI SDK v6+ | Agent abstraction, define once reuse across interfaces |
| AI Gateway | Vercel AI Gateway | Single endpoint for 100s of models, budgets, retries, fallbacks |
| AI Workflows | Vercel Workflows (GA Apr 2026) | Durable execution for long-running AI processes, 200K+ npm downloads/week |