The boring stack: Vercel, Railway, Resend, GitHub

There's a kind of developer who builds you a custom deployment pipeline on a bare Linux box with a hand-written systemd service, and then leaves. Six months later something breaks and nobody can find the password.

We don't do that. Every project we ship runs on the same short list of managed services, chosen because a non-specialist can log in and understand them.

The list

GitHub holds the code. Private repository under your organization from day one. Every change is a pull request with a description. The history tells you what changed and why.

Vercel serves the web app. It's connected to the GitHub repository, so merging to the main branch deploys to production and every pull request gets its own preview URL. Rollback is one click.

Railway runs the API, the database, and any background workers. Same GitHub connection, same deploy-on-merge. Postgres with automatic backups. Logs and metrics in the dashboard.

Resend sends email: sign-in links, receipts, notifications. It has a real deliverability setup and a log of every message sent.

Sentry catches errors from every layer, the iOS app included. When a user reports a bug, the crash is already in Sentry with their user ID attached.

Xcode Cloud and TestFlight build and distribute the Apple apps. Builds are triggered manually, never on push, so a stray commit never spends your daily build allowance.

Why this list

Each service has a web dashboard your team can use without reading our code. Each one bills to your card, not ours. Each one has a free tier that covers most early-stage apps, and predictable pricing after that.

We could save a little money running it all ourselves. You'd pay it back the first time something broke at 2 a.m.

What it costs

For an early-stage app with a few thousand users:

Call it $50 to $150 a month, all under your own accounts, all cancellable, no contract with us to keep it running.

What you get at handoff

A document that lists every service, what it does, where to log in, and how to roll back. Your team can run the product the day we're done. That's the point.