I built a free AI tool that picks your SaaS tech stack based on budget
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Hey HN, I kept seeing the same question asked over and over in startup communities: "What tech stack should I use for my SaaS?" The answers were always scattered, opinionated, and never accounted for budget or team size. So I built appstackbuilder.com — you tell it your monthly budget, app type, team size, and skill level, and it recommends a full stack (auth, database, hosting, payments, analytics, etc.) with actual pricing for each tool. A few things that make it different from generic advice: - It accounts for team size when calculating costs (e.g. Clerk charges per user, Linear charges per seat — most stack guides ignore this) - You can toggle "no-code only" if you're a non-technical founder - It shows you 2–3 alternatives per category, not just one option - You can export the full stack as a PDF or share a link - It's completely free, no account required Under the hood: Next.js, Supabase, and Gemini for the recommendations. The tool database has ~80+ tools across categories with real pricing data I manually verified. What I'm still figuring out: - How to keep pricing data fresh as tools change plans frequently - Whether to add a "stack score" based on community usage data - If the no-code recommendations are actually good (I'm a developer, so I'd love feedback from non-technical founders specifically) Would love brutal feedback, especially if the recommendations feel off for your use case.
HN · launched Feb 22, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 72%) · 0 views
Niche: software discovery and resource directories · 172 launches, 9 in the last 7 days ▼ -31% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Agent / copilot
- Developer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 172 launches in software discovery and resource directories →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a standard web application with a form taking user constraints (budget, app type) and feeding them to an LLM prompt to output a curated tech stack recommendation.
Discussion
4 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Next.js, Supabase, Clerk, Vercel, Stripe
Concerns raised: Not exactly what user chose for their startup
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 248 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #223 of 249 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 115 days after the earliest competitor.
- CutTheStack · ph · 2026-11-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- AI Stack Picker by AIBuildersUse · ph · 2026-10-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- I built a SaaS without knowing how to code · hn · 2026-08-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Gigacatalyst · hn · 2026-05-12 · 61 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- SubTrack · hn · 2026-01-12 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- BigIdeasDB · ph · 2026-11-07 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- I open-sourced my Go and Next B2B SaaS Starter (deploy anywhere, MIT) · hn · 2025-12-19 · 83 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- SaaS TechStack Growth Simulator™ · ph · 2026-11-03 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.42
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