The tooling available to a solo developer today is genuinely remarkable. What required a team of five in 2018 — backend, frontend, infrastructure, payments, email — can now be assembled by one person in days using hosted services.
That said, the abundance of options creates its own paralysis. Let me share what I have learned building developer utilities on my own.
Stack Choices: Boring Is Good
Choose technologies you already know reasonably well, not technologies you want to learn. The goal at the start is shipping, not learning.
That said, a few general principles have served me well:
- Managed databases: Neon (Postgres), PlanetScale, or Supabase over self-hosted databases. Managing a database server is a job on its own.
- Serverless-friendly backends: FastAPI on Railway or Render, or Edge Functions on Vercel for lighter APIs. Avoid managing servers until you have revenue justifying the ops overhead.
- Frontend frameworks that compile to static assets: React with Vite, or Next.js. Static assets on a CDN are fast and cheap.
The stack for Devpads — FastAPI + asyncpg + Neon + React + Vite on Vercel — cost essentially nothing to run at zero traffic and scaled to handle real users without any infrastructure changes.
Pricing: Charge Earlier Than Feels Comfortable
Most solo developers underprice or do not charge at all. Free tools are fine if the monetization is advertising or acquisition — but if you want subscription revenue, charge as soon as the product is useful to someone.
A product people pay for, even ten users at ten dollars a month, tells you something no amount of free usage can: that you have solved a real problem.
Distribution Is the Hard Part
The best-built product that nobody discovers fails. Distribution is the actual hard problem for solo developers.
What has worked consistently in the developer tool space:
- Write about what you build. Technical blog posts that teach something draw organic search traffic for years.
- Be present in communities where your users already are. Reddit communities, Discord servers, Hacker News Show HN posts.
- Integrate with existing workflows. If your tool fits into something developers already do (GitHub, VS Code, their terminal), adoption friction drops significantly.
Building Devpads taught me that organic search traffic from technical blog content is far more durable than any product hunt launch spike.