My Solo Founder Stack: The Tools I Use to Run 3 Startups Alone
The complete list of tools I use to build, market, and operate multiple SaaS products as a single person - from code to infrastructure to growth.
Why tool choices matter more when you are alone
When you have a team of five, a mediocre tool is a minor annoyance. Someone complains, the team adapts, work continues. When you are a solo founder, every tool is load-bearing. A bad choice means hours lost per week with nobody to delegate to. A good choice means one less thing demanding your attention.
I run three active products (Pitchgale, Mailydone, and a content site) entirely alone while holding a full-time position as Solutions Architect. The stack below is what I have settled on after considerable trial and error. Everything earns its place by saving more time than it costs.
Development and infrastructure
| Tool | Purpose | Why this one |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | Primary coding agent | Terminal-based, full codebase context, handles complex refactors well |
| Cursor | Quick edits, visual navigation | Faster for small changes where I want the file tree visible |
| GitHub | Repos and CI/CD | GitHub Actions handles all deployment pipelines |
| Hetzner VPS | Hosting everything | 5-10 EUR/month per server, performance is excellent for the price |
| Caddy | Reverse proxy and TLS | Automatic HTTPS, configuration is simpler than nginx |
| Cloudflare | DNS, CDN, protection | The free tier covers every feature I actually need |
| SQLite | Database for all products | Simple, fast, zero maintenance, backed up with a file copy |
One thing worth mentioning: I do not use Vercel, Netlify, or any platform-as-a-service. A 5 EUR VPS with Caddy handles all my sites. Total hosting cost across three products comes to roughly 20 EUR per month. That number matters when you are bootstrapping.
AI tooling
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Claude Code | Coding, architecture decisions, complex reasoning tasks |
| Nova (custom-built) | Private AI marketing agent for competitor monitoring, SEO tracking, content |
| ChatGPT | Quick research, brainstorming, getting a second opinion on copy |
Nova deserves its own explanation. It is a custom agent I built specifically for marketing automation. It runs continuously, monitors competitor websites and pricing, tracks my SEO rankings daily, and prepares content drafts based on what is performing well. I will write a dedicated post about the architecture soon.
Marketing and growth
| Tool | Purpose | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Plausible (self-hosted) | Privacy-friendly analytics | 0 EUR |
| Google Search Console | SEO monitoring, keyword data | Free |
| Astro | Static sites and blogs | Free |
| X Premium | Personal brand distribution | ~10 EUR |
| Reddit and IndieHackers | Community positioning | Free |
Total marketing spend: approximately 10 EUR per month plus my time. No paid ads, no expensive SaaS analytics tools, no agency. The time investment is significant (probably 8-10 hours per week across all channels), but the cash outlay is nearly zero.
Operations
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Obsidian | Knowledge base, strategy docs, business notes |
| PM2 | Process management for Node services |
| GitHub Actions | Automated builds, deploys, scheduled tasks |
Three principles behind the choices
Own your infrastructure. I do not depend on platforms that can change pricing or shut down. My servers are VPS instances I control entirely. My data lives in SQLite files I can back up with cp. My knowledge base is Markdown files in a local folder. If any third-party service disappears tomorrow, I lose nothing critical.
Minimize recurring costs. At the early stage, every euro of MRR matters. Keeping infrastructure under 50 EUR/month means I can survive indefinitely without revenue pressure. That freedom to wait lets me make better long-term product decisions instead of optimizing for short-term cash.
Prefer simple over clever. SQLite instead of Postgres (until I genuinely need Postgres). Static sites instead of server-side rendering (until I genuinely need SSR). Cron jobs instead of event queues (until I genuinely need event queues). Every layer of complexity is a maintenance burden with nobody else to share it.
What I explicitly do not use
A few deliberate exclusions that people often ask about:
- Kubernetes or Docker in production - total overkill for my scale. PM2 and systemd are sufficient.
- Notion - Obsidian is local-first, fast, and the files are plain Markdown I can process programmatically.
- Zapier or Make - I write code. Custom integrations are more reliable and do not cost 20+ EUR/month for volume.
- Any tool over 50 EUR/month - hard ceiling until revenue clearly justifies the expense.
The underlying point
The best solo founder stack is not about picking the “best” tools in each category. It is about minimizing context switching and maintenance overhead while maximizing output per hour spent. Every SaaS subscription is a dependency. Every platform is a potential risk. Keep things lean, keep them under your control, and spend your limited bandwidth on building product and acquiring users rather than managing infrastructure.
I write about the operational side of running startups solo. More on X.