Choose around the product's constraints
Write down what the product needs before comparing framework names. A web dashboard, an offline mobile tool, and a long-running research workflow have different constraints. Decide which clients you need, what data belongs to each customer, and which operations must continue after a browser tab closes.
Consider your team's experience alongside feature lists. A familiar stack with clear boundaries can be easier to maintain than a newer combination that requires learning authentication, deployment, and persistence conventions at the same time. Count the ongoing work of upgrades and debugging, not just the first installation.
Inspect the seams between tools
A stack is a collection of integration decisions. Find out who owns sessions, how records are scoped, where a payment event becomes an entitlement, and how the UI retrieves the result of background work. These connections determine whether the happy path remains correct when requests fail or arrive twice.
supastack uses Next.js for the web surface, Expo for mobile, and shared TypeScript packages underneath. Better Auth owns identity, Postgres and Drizzle persist records, and Trigger.dev owns explicit workflow behavior. Those are repository choices, not a claim that every product should use the same tools.
Build a small vertical slice
Before committing to a stack, run a slice that signs a user in, writes an owned record, starts work, and retrieves a result. Then deliberately try the wrong workspace, an expired session, and a failed job. Evaluate how much custom glue those ordinary conditions require.
Keep a short decision record: what the stack supports, what you are choosing to postpone, and what would trigger a revisit. Native purchasing, real-provider acceptance, and deployment operations should be explicit items rather than assumptions hidden behind a successful local build. The right stack leaves the team enough attention to work on the product.