Why this matters
Many founders think first about a logo, domain, and Instagram. In practice, though, your tech stack often determines how quickly you go live, how expensive your setup becomes, and whether you can scale cleanly down the road.
Turn knowledge into a start plan
This guide explains one topic. Whether it is really a priority for you right now depends on your answers in the start plan.
Create start planThe most important idea: not every project needs the same platform
A simple portfolio, a small shop, an AI tool, and a growing online store all have different technical needs. The mistake is often not choosing the wrong tool, but treating a tool too early as the final solution.
For pure visibility, a website builder or a static site is often enough. For real shop processes, you need a shopping cart, payments, shipping, email, legal texts, and product data. For an AI tool or an interactive advisor, you also need API routes, a database, authentication, and telemetry.
Vercel and Netlify for web projects
Vercel is especially strong if you work with Next.js. You get Git-based deployments, preview URLs, serverless functions, and an environment that fits modern React and AI products very well.
Important: According to Vercel's own terms, the Vercel Hobby Plan is intended for non-commercial personal use only. If your side business intends to make money with it, advertise products or services, use affiliate links as a primary purpose, or process payments, you should check which paid plan applies to your situation.
Netlify is also a solid starting point for static sites, frontend projects, and many JAMstack setups. For some projects Netlify is simpler; for Next.js-heavy products, Vercel often feels more natural.
Free plans are useful for testing and building, but they are not a permanent business model. Once a project becomes commercial, has real users, or handles important functionality, you should review limits, terms of service, data protection requirements, upgrade costs, and your backup strategy.
Supabase as a starter backend
Supabase is worth considering when you quickly need a Postgres database, authentication, storage, or edge functions. For side projects, this is often faster than building your own backend from scratch.
For a tool like Freya, Supabase is particularly useful because you can store structured signals — for example, categories, provider clicks, or feedback — without permanently storing complete raw chat histories.
As soon as real user data is being processed, you need to take your data model, data protection obligations, service role keys, and Row-Level Security (RLS) seriously. Supabase explicitly points out that RLS should be enabled for tables in exposed schemas and that service keys must never end up in the browser.
The Free Plan is fine for getting started, but you should review limits, project pausing due to inactivity, storage, egress, and backup topics before the project becomes production-ready or commercially important.
Wix and Shopify for websites and shops
Wix can make sense for simple websites, local services, and smaller shops — especially if you want to build visually and quickly without needing much technical control.
Shopify is stronger when your focus is clearly on e-commerce: products, orders, payments, inventory, apps, shipping, and scaling. That said, additional costs often arise through apps, themes, payment providers, and ongoing shop subscriptions.
A practical rule of thumb: if your business model is primarily content or services, Shopify does not automatically have to be your first choice. If your business model is selling physical or digital goods, a proper shop system should be evaluated early.
A sensible starting checklist
Before choosing tools, write down what you actually need: website, shop, newsletter, database, accounting, CRM, payment provider, automation, and tracking. Then decide what is immediately necessary and what would merely be nice to have.
The exit question also matters: can you later access your content, customers, product data, and orders? A cheap or simple tool is only a good choice if it does not lock you in permanently.
Quick checklist
- Is your project primarily a website, shop, tool, blog, or community?
- Do you need payments, login, a database, an API, or just a landing page?
- Can you live with free plan limits, or is the project already commercial?
- Can you export your content, customers, and product data later?
- Have you thought about data protection, legal notice (Impressum), tracking, and data processing agreements (Auftragsverarbeitung)?
Common mistakes
- Choosing Shopify even though you don't yet have a real product catalog.
- Choosing Wix and later realizing you need very specific data or API logic.
- Planning on free plans as a permanently cost-free business model, even though commercial use, limits, or data protection requirements may make an upgrade necessary.
- Only reviewing your database, API keys, and data protection obligations once real users are already there.
- Subscribing to a new tool for every task and losing track of the overall setup.
What this guide can and cannot do
This guide helps with
- roughly categorize your project as a website, shop, tool, or content project
- help you choose a sensible starting stack without unnecessary complexity
- show you which tool categories you actually need
This guide does not replace
- check for you whether a free plan is legally or contractually suitable for your specific commercial use case
- provide binding assessments of your data protection or data processing agreements (Auftragsverarbeitungsverträge)
- replace a technical architecture review by developers or a data protection consultant