When you understand that starting a "project" will take up most of your life to be really successful, you start to think more carefully about the first steps.

One of those steps is the tech stack.

Tech is tricky, because it evolves so quickly. It's important to choose a stack that will be easy to transmogrify into the next-best-thing, and that all your content is accessible, and movable.

Today I am knee-deep in platform selection. After mooching through many options I thought I would share some of them with you today, and my thoughts on them.

First of all - my requirements: I need a content platform that will

• hold written content.

• have a member's only area

• have a subscribe-able newsletter

• be monetizable

• be scalable

• be open (i.e. have an open API)

• be easy for a designer to setup

• not be expensive

There are many options. Some are platforms, and there are other hosted solutions but where the backend is open to me to update.

3rd party platforms I looked at

• Wordpress (of course)

• Ghost

• Medium

• Squarespace (where I host my website)

• Hashnode (today, newbie here). Love the look.

Custom options?

• Meteor.js

• Strapi

• Next.js

• Vercel

And here I am. vercel is looking like a strong candidate for its ownership, free pricing tier, scalability, flexibility and open-ness. The downside is that I need to fix this up myself.

All the 3rd party options like Wordpress had the closed system downsides. Either no open API, tiered pricing models (equals expensive) or too limited options.

Decentralised vs Centralised model

I see two main options: centralised 3rd party platforms, vs custom tooling stacks. Platforms offer maintenance, speed and consistency. Stacks offer flexibility, but require some maintenance work.

In the end I need my content to be where I need it to be, and not in a walled-garden. On the other hand, my aim is to "travel light", and focus on the monetizable aspect of my content; without the "spanner time" in the works.

It's like choosing between cookies, or cake.

Anyone out there want to share their two-cents with me? I would appreciate it.

Yours hopefully,
Hashnode noob.