Make the call, then get back to building.
Plain-spoken, sourced guides to the technical decisions every product team runs into: databases, hosting, auth, payments, email, AI models and the tools around them. No vendor sponsorships, and every claim links to where it came from.
Build vs. buy: a framework for technical decisionsA practical framework for deciding whether to build or buy software: total cost of ownership, core vs. context, switching costs, team capacity, and risk.
Choosing an auth provider: Clerk, Auth0, WorkOS, or DIYClerk vs. Auth0 vs. WorkOS vs. a library like Better Auth: pricing, SSO and SCIM, developer experience, password hash export, and compliance.
Feature flags: LaunchDarkly vs. Statsig vs. open sourceHow LaunchDarkly, Statsig, and open-source flag tools compare on price, experimentation, portability, and privacy, plus how to keep flag debt in check.
How to write a technical decision recordHow to write architecture decision records: where ADRs came from, Nygard vs. MADR vs. Y-statements, a copy-paste template, and a full worked example.
Observability on a budget: Datadog vs. Grafana vs. HoneycombHow Datadog, Grafana Cloud, and Honeycomb charge for metrics, logs, and traces, why bills grow, and how a startup keeps observability costs under control.
Picking an LLM API for productionHow to choose between Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini and open-weight models: evals, October 2026 prices, limits, privacy, clouds and lock-in.
Postgres vs. MySQL for a new product in 2026Postgres 18 or MySQL 9.7 LTS for a new product? Versions, licensing, JSON, vector search, schema changes, and managed hosting, compared plainly.
SaaS payments: Stripe vs. Paddle vs. Lemon SqueezyMerchant of record explained, plus fees, tax, chargebacks, payouts and migration risk for Stripe, Paddle and Lemon Squeezy as of October 2026.
Transactional email: Resend vs. Postmark vs. Amazon SESResend, Postmark, or Amazon SES for password resets and receipts: pricing, deliverability, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, inbound mail, logs, and lock-in.
Where to host a web app: Cloudflare Workers vs. Vercel vs. AWSCloudflare Workers, Vercel, or AWS for a new web app? Free tiers, pricing, limits, cold starts, databases, and lock-in, plus when a plain container wins.