The Best SaaS Tech Stack: What I Recommend and Why

If I were starting a new SaaS today, my SaaS tech stack would be Laravel on the backend, React with Inertia on the frontend, PostgreSQL or MySQL for data, Stripe for subscriptions, and managed hosting in an EU region. It's a deliberately boring setup, and that's the point: it gets you to paying customers fastest with the fewest moving parts.

I'm a freelance Laravel and React developer based in Denmark, so weigh my bias accordingly. Below you'll find the reasoning, a six-step way to make the call yourself, and the situations where you should ignore my advice.

The short answer: my stack, layer by layer

None of these picks is exotic, and that's on purpose. A SaaS succeeds or fails on whether people will pay for it, not on how modern the database is. Every hour you spend on infrastructure is an hour you don't spend on the product or on talking to customers.

This post covers the technical foundation only. If you're earlier in the process, start with my guide to building a SaaS from idea to paying customers.

How to choose a SaaS tech stack in six steps

My recommendation is a starting point, not the answer key. Here's how I'd make the decision if I were in your seat:

1. Start with who will build and maintain it. The best stack is the one your developer or team can ship in quickly and safely. An experienced Python developer will build a better SaaS in Django than in a framework they're learning on your budget. Also ask who will take over the code in three years, and whether you can hire for that stack in your market.
2. Write down the hard requirements. Does the product need real-time updates, heavy data processing, AI, offline support or a mobile app? Requirements like these should drive the choice far more than taste. If you're not sure yet what version one includes, scope your MVP before you pick any technology.
3. Pick a backend framework that has solved the boring parts. Authentication, roles, email, queues, scheduled jobs and database migrations shouldn't be built from scratch. Laravel, Rails and Django ship with all of it. A minimal Express setup means assembling and maintaining those pieces yourself.
4. Choose the frontend based on interactivity and SEO. If most of the product lives behind a login, something like Inertia is plenty. If many public pages need to rank on Google, Next.js earns its extra complexity.
5. Pick your database and hosting region with your customers in mind. If you sell to European businesses, keep the database, backups and file storage in an EU region from day one, even if your company is based in the UK or US. It doesn't make you GDPR compliant on its own, but data location is often one of the first questions on a customer's security questionnaire.
6. Buy your way out of everything that isn't the core product. Payments, transactional email (receipts, password resets), error tracking and possibly authentication through a third-party provider cost very little compared to building and maintaining them yourself.

Why Laravel is my default backend

Laravel is a PHP framework that includes most of the building blocks a SaaS needs, either in the core or as official first-party packages. That means fewer third-party dependencies to keep updated and fewer decisions at the stage where your time is most valuable.

What that looks like in practice:

• Laravel's official starter kits give you login, registration, password resets, email verification and two-factor authentication on day one. They can also be generated with team support, where each user belongs to one or more teams. That's exactly the account structure most B2B products need.
• Queues and scheduled jobs are built in, so emails, exports, reports and syncing with other systems happen in the background.
• Laravel Cashier handles subscriptions, trials, plan changes with proration, coupons, invoices and Stripe webhooks (the events Stripe sends when, say, a payment fails). There's a Paddle version too. Which provider fits depends a lot on how you want to deal with EU VAT, which I cover in my comparison of SaaS subscription billing options.
• The ecosystem is mature. Documentation, packages and developers who can take over the code are easy to find, so you're not tied to one person.

The downsides belong here too. PHP still carries a reputation from its early days, and some investors and developers will raise an eyebrow. Laravel is opinionated, and fighting its conventions gets painful fast. And if your team is all JavaScript developers, forcing them into PHP is rarely a good idea.

How you keep each customer's data separate (multi-tenancy) is its own decision, and one you should make early whatever framework you pick.

React with Inertia or Next.js?

This is where a lot of projects get more complicated than they need to be.

With Inertia, you write the interface in React while routing, authorization and data loading stay in Laravel. Users get a fast app that doesn't reload on every click, and you get one codebase, one deployment and no separate API to version and secure. Laravel's React starter kit is built on React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind and the shadcn/ui component library, so you're not starting from a blank page.

Next.js is a strong framework, and I work with it too. I typically reach for it when:

• public pages are a core part of the product, such as profiles, listings or a marketplace that needs to be found on Google
• the whole team writes JavaScript or TypeScript and needs to work across every layer
• the frontend has to talk to several backends or an existing API

The cost is usually two codebases: Next.js on the frontend and an API behind it. You can run Next.js outside Vercel, but the official Next.js self-hosting guide shows that once you run more than one server, caching, encryption keys and version skew become your problem. None of it is hard, but it's more to look after. For the full picture, see my Laravel vs Next.js comparison.

If your team is PHP-first, Livewire is a third route: interactive screens without writing much JavaScript at all. And your marketing site (homepage, pricing, blog) doesn't have to live inside the app. A simple, separate website works fine.

Database, queues and hosting in the EU

PostgreSQL and MySQL can both carry the vast majority of SaaS products for years, and Laravel supports both. Pick the one your developer knows best and spend the energy on a sensible data model instead of database debates. For queues and cache I recommend Redis or Valkey, an open-source fork of Redis.

Hosting should be managed, so nobody on your side is patching servers at 3 a.m. There are two realistic routes:

• Laravel Cloud is a fully managed platform where Laravel handles servers, scaling and maintenance. It starts at $5 a month plus usage (billed in US dollars) and offers EU regions in Frankfurt and Ireland, plus London if UK hosting suits you better. Their own estimate for an early-stage SaaS MVP comes to about $34 a month, roughly €30.
• With Forge, you rent your own server from a provider with European data centers, and Forge handles provisioning and deployments. You get more control and often a lower bill at steady traffic, but also more responsibility.

I'd hold off on AWS with containers and Kubernetes until someone's job is to run it. I go deeper on the trade-offs in my overview of SaaS hosting options.

What I wouldn't build on day one

Wasted time in new SaaS projects rarely comes from picking the wrong framework. More often it comes from architecture built for 100,000 users before the product has ten. Here's what I'd leave out of version one:

• Microservices. A monolith, meaning one application, is faster to build, test and debug. Split it only when one part of the system has a concrete reason to stand alone.
• Kubernetes and custom infrastructure. It needs someone to operate it, and early on you rarely have that person.
• A separate API "just in case". Build it when a mobile app or an integration partner actually needs it.
• Your own billing engine or homemade authentication. Stripe and proven packages have solved this better than you will in a couple of weeks.
• A native mobile app from the start. A responsive web app is enough to find out whether anyone will pay.
• Whatever framework launched last year. Newer tools have fewer answers online and fewer developers who can take over your code.

The same restraint applies to the product itself. My list of features your MVP doesn't need at launch covers that side.

When my recommendation is the wrong fit

Laravel and React aren't the answer to everything. Choose differently if:

• Your team already knows another stack well, like .NET, Django or Rails. Use it. What you'd gain by switching is smaller than what it costs.
• Everyone on the team writes TypeScript. Then a full TypeScript stack with Next.js, a Node.js backend, PostgreSQL and an ORM like Prisma or Drizzle is a sensible choice, because anyone can work on any layer.
• The product is built around machine learning or your own AI models. Python has the strongest ecosystem for that. If you're just calling hosted AI models through an API, Laravel handles it fine.
• Real-time collaboration is the core of the product, like several people editing the same document at once. Laravel has its own WebSocket server (Reverb) for notifications and live updates, but a product where real-time is the whole point may need tools built specifically for it.
• You haven't validated the idea yet. Then it's too early to pick a stack. A landing page, pre-sales or a manual version of the service will teach you more than code.

That also means a Laravel developer like me isn't always the right hire. If you have a TypeScript team that needs another pair of hands, find someone who lives in exactly that stack.

Next steps: check your stack before you build

Run through this list before the first line of code gets written. It fits my recommended stack, but it works for most others too.

If you can tick every box, your foundation is in good shape. If several are missing, or you're not sure the stack fits your product, have a look at how I approach SaaS development. For larger builds I start with a paid, fixed-price discovery phase where scope and technology get settled before any code is written, and you own the code from day one.

Frequently asked questions

Can I change my tech stack later?+

Yes, but rewriting everything is rarely a good business decision. The realistic path is replacing parts gradually: moving hosting, rebuilding the frontend screen by screen, or pulling one heavy feature out into its own service. Full rewrites usually take longer than planned, and customers get nothing new in the meantime. That's why it pays to start with something well known.

Isn't PHP outdated?+

No. PHP is actively developed with a new feature release every year, and Laravel is on version 13 in 2026. The bad reputation comes from an era when a lot of PHP was written without frameworks or tests. Modern PHP with types, automated tests and a framework like Laravel is a safe choice for a SaaS. What matters most is that you can find developers for it, and you can.

What does this stack cost to run each month?+

Early on, hosting is usually tens of euros a month, not hundreds, as the Laravel Cloud estimate above shows. On top of that come payment processing fees, a transactional email service and error tracking, several of which have free tiers at the start. The real cost is development and maintenance, not servers.

Can I build my SaaS with an AI app builder instead?+

For testing an idea and producing a clickable prototype quickly, yes. For a product with paying customers, you need solid authentication, permissions, billing, backups and security, and that's exactly where generated prototypes tend to fall short. A common path is to validate the idea with the prototype, then have the production version built on a well-known stack.

What stack should I pick if I also need a mobile app?+

Start with a responsive web app and build the API once the mobile app is actually on the roadmap. Laravel works well as the backend for a React Native app, so your business logic can be reused. If the app relies heavily on phone features, go with React Native or a fully native app. Otherwise a PWA (a web app users can install on their phone) can take you a long way.