Modern AI-First SaaS Stack — What We're Building On

Our current stack: Next.js (frontend + API routes) → Supabase (auth + database + realtime) → Stripe (billing) → Vercel (hosting + edge functions) → Resend (transactional email). Total infrastructure cost at launch: $0/mo (all free tiers). At 100 customers: ~$50/mo. At 1000 customers: ~$200/mo. This is the correct stack for shipping fast with minimal ops burden.

Strengths: Vercel's DX is unmatched for Next.js — deploy on push, preview URLs, edge functions. Supabase gives you Postgres + auth + row-level security without managing infrastructure. Resend is the modern Mailgun — clean API, React email templates, good deliverability. Stripe is non-negotiable for payment processing.

Weaknesses to watch: Supabase free tier has connection limits that bite at ~50 concurrent users. Vercel's serverless functions have cold start latency (100-300ms) that matters for webhook processing. Next.js App Router is still buggy for complex client-side state. For the trading system and ClawdBot, we run on a $24/mo DigitalOcean VPS (4GB RAM) which handles the gateway, chat bridge, Gordon's face, and the overnight worker. The VPS is the bottleneck — 4GB RAM means we can't run trading + agents simultaneously.