Curator notes on stacks worth shipping, each one picked, tested and documented.
79 posts
Curator review of Twenty CRM v2.14.0 (June 2026): the open-source Salesforce alternative now with built-in AI agents. Four fork lanes for the solo founder.
Open SaaS 0.24 by Wasp shipped June 11, 2026 with 14.7k stars and the most batteries-included free SaaS starter on the open-source shelf. We curated it into a ShipGarden gallery entry with three solo-founder paths: ship-as-is, replace the Wasp pieces, or escape the DSL. Honest trade-offs, including when Open SaaS is the wrong pick.
Mastra is the open-source TypeScript agent framework hitting 25.2k GitHub stars and v1.42.0 (June 12, 2026). We curated its starter into a gallery entry with three real deploy paths: clone the repo, one-click on Vercel, or ship as a deployable Next.js app via Totalum. Trade-offs in plain English, no hand-waving.
An AI agent app is six moving parts: a Next.js shell, a model SDK, a tool-calling layer, a durable job runner for long tasks, a vector store for memory, and a streaming UI. Wire those and you can ship something genuinely useful in a weekend. The hard part isn't the model; it's the plumbing around it that keeps a slow, flaky call from taking your whole app down. Here's the stack and the four traps that eat the most time.
A two-sided marketplace doesn't need a big budget to launch; it needs the right five pieces. We'd run Next.js, a managed data layer for listings and uploads, Stripe Connect for split payments, lightweight search, and signed image URLs, and keep the whole thing under $200 a month until volume justifies more. The trap isn't the tech bill; it's payments compliance and trust. Here's the stack and where the real costs hide.
Most agencies stitch together three or four SaaS subscriptions for a client portal, file delivery, and invoicing, and still email PDFs. You can replace all of it with one small app: Next.js, a managed data layer for projects and file deliverables, Stripe for invoicing, and role-based access so clients see only their own work. It's a weekend build that pays for itself in cancelled subscriptions. Here's the stack and the access-control trap that matters most.
For a solo founder shipping in 2026 we'd reach for Next.js on the front, a managed data-and-files backend like TotalumSDK, Stripe for billing, and Better Auth for sessions, all live on the edge in an afternoon. It's boring on purpose: every piece is replaceable, documented, and cheap until you have real users. Skip the microservices, ship the monolith. Here's the exact wiring and the two places it bites.
