In recent years, I have tended to be conservative in my selection of services or tools, with a focus on practice. I want to focus on the product rather than more third-party services.
Tools
- JetBrains All Pack - While you’re searching for VSCode plugins or trying the 125th new IDE, I’m already in bed reading manga.
- JetBrains AI Assistant - While you’re praising Cursor and frantically tweeting about the next-gen AI autocompletion, I’m already done with my manga and fast asleep.
- Buffer - The veteran SNS publishing manager. I only use the free version since I don’t have extensive marketing needs.
- VEED - A new video editing tool from recent years, excellent UX but somewhat pricey.
- SEO Gets - A better Google Search Console. I don’t have the paid version so I’m not sure about new features.
- Resend - Next-gen mail sender with great DX.
Platforms
- Porkbun - Domain management, migrated here after fleeing from Google Domain.
- Lemon Squeezy - Great DX, they really understand what developers need. The only missing feature is Dark Mode.
- Vercel - I’ve moved most of my products from GCP to Vercel. The DX is amazing, and the reduced mental overhead is totally worth it. It hasn’t been as expensive as imagined so far.
- BunnyCDN - A lesser-known European CDN. Their pay-as-you-go model helps reduce psychological pressure, it’s affordable, suitable for storing large files, and performance is decent.
- Aptabase - An analytics board made by an independent developer, designed for cross-platform apps. Hasn’t been updated for a while, considering stopping or self-hosting.
- GCP - When GCP first launched, they used ultra-low prices and lots of discounts to grab market share. I’m one of those trapped cash cows. Currently mainly using CloudRun and Firestore. It’s not bad actually, just that the dashboard is really slow…
- GitHub - Yes, I have GitHub! Surprising, right? I create an org for each product to separate them from miscellaneous small projects, and get some extra free CI hours in the process.
AI
- OpenAI - I rarely use OpenAI API in products, mostly for PoC. Price is the main factor.
- Anthropic - In my experience, Claude is the best for text or artistic tasks.
- Google - Gemini’s features are super long context, Google’s rich knowledge base, and affordable pricing. Other aspects aren’t as good as the previous two.
- Groq - An open-source model hosting platform. They have their own inference computing chips, so the speed is on a different level compared to others. Will become a game changer after DeepSeek appears.
Under Consideration
- Mistral - My impression is they’re strong in small models, but not sure about recent progress. Le Chat’s recent speed impressed me, will spend some time researching.
- Supabase - Everyone says it’s great, but Firestore isn’t that bad, and I’m already used to the doc-based format.
- Upstash - Looks promising, probably will use it in the future, keeping an eye on it.
- Turso - The development team behind
libSQL(a fork ofsqlite). Client-side partial db seems to have many use cases, watching closely. - Clerk - Honestly, I don’t want to hand over User Management to others, but it’s annoying to do it myself. Will try it in the next project but probably won’t migrate existing products.