./i-dont-know-the-stack
Everyone's told you something different.
One person says React Native. Someone else says native or don't bother. A no-code consultant says you don't need developers at all. Everyone sounds certain, everyone has an incentive, and you have no way to tell who's right.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: for most early products, the stack matters far less than anyone selling you a stack wants to admit. What matters is whether the data model survives contact with your second feature. That's the decision worth agonising over, and almost nobody frames it that way.
This is you if
- You've had four recommendations and they contradict each other
- You're choosing between no-code and custom and can't tell where the ceiling is
- You need to know if a decision is reversible before you commit
- You're worried about being locked in
- Someone quoted you double for "native" and you don't know if that's justified
How this works
A short engagement — a call, sometimes two, plus a written recommendation. I look at what you're building, who it's for, how fast it needs to move, and what your realistic budget is. Then I give you a specific answer, not a list of options with pros and cons.
I have no reseller relationships and no partnership with any vendor. Sometimes the honest answer is "start on Bubble, you'll know within six months whether you need to move."
Questions that actually decide it
Does it need to work offline? This narrows things fast.
Are you doing anything heavy on-device? Camera, audio, real-time — this is where cross-platform starts costing more than it saves.
How many platforms on day one? Usually the answer should be one.
What can you hire for later? A stack you can't staff is a trap, however good it is.
What's reversible? The frontend framework, mostly. The data model, no. Spend your worry there.
My default, and when I break it
For most products: TypeScript, Next.js on the web, React Native or Expo on mobile, Postgres via Supabase. It's fast, it's staffable, and almost nothing about it is a one-way door.
I break it for heavy on-device work, for anything with serious offline requirements, and when an existing team already knows something else well. A team's existing knowledge usually beats a marginally better tool.
FAQ
- Is React Native good enough for a real product?
- For most products, yes. It stops being enough when you're doing heavy on-device processing, complex gestures, or need platform features at the moment they launch. Kolibi does real-time photo analysis and works fine — so the line is further out than most people assume.
- Supabase or Firebase?
- Supabase if you want SQL, relational data and a clean exit path. Firebase if you're deep in Google's ecosystem and your data is genuinely document-shaped. Most products I see are relational and people discover this too late.
- Can I start with no-code and migrate later?
- Yes, and it's often the right call. The migration cost is real but it's paid later with better information — and plenty of products never need to migrate at all.
- What's the most expensive mistake at this stage?
- Not the framework. It's a data model that only fits version one. Changing the frontend is a project. Changing the data model after you have real users is surgery.