Building Solo

The tech tools I use

It's been over a month since I quit my full-time job, and now I’ve been exploring, tinkering, and building things on my own. It’s a revealing shift from working for someone else to working for yourself.

During this time, I’ve created two complete consumer products that are live and generally available.

1. Real Food App - Measure how whole or processed your food is

2. VoxBee - A local, privacy-first speech-to-text app for MacOS and Linux

They’re not groundbreaking ideas, but I wanted to strengthen my ability to build a product from start to finish that anyone can use. As we know, with all the progress in AI, coding is nearly a solved problem — but launching a full product still requires time and skill with the available tools.

Photo by hosein zanbori on Unsplash

There are many things you need to figure out—like hosting, CI/CD, payments, email providers, databses and more. So, yes, I’ve gone down this rabbit hole of developing end-to-end applications, and I thought, hey, this might help others build in the same way. Here’s a useful list of what I’m using:

1. Hosting Platform: Vercel (mostly for small projects), Hetzner for one-off VPS, GCP for some production enterprise stuff (yes, I’m building with a friend here).

2. Object Storage: Cloudflare R2 (for storing my VoxBee MacOS app packages and failed images for Real Food App). It’s cheaper than S3 and follows the same API conventions, so it’s better.

3. Vibing tool: Claude Code (orchestrated by Conductor), ChatGPT (for all deep questions), Gemini. Although I feel there’s a better editor than Conductor to be built, I am thinking of one. I will keep you posted.

4. Agent Skills: skills.sh, I have also created my own skills here that I use extensively. It’s available for free via skills.sh. I also Anthropic’s frontend design skill to work on UI.

5. Web Search API: Brave Search API (There is a free tier), Perplexity (Pay per use)

6. Emails: Resend (really good service; I use the Pro subscription that supports 10 domains and cost $20/month).

7. CI/CD: GitHub Actions. If you’re using Linux machines, the free plan should work fine, but if you’re on a Mac while building a Swift App, it can be more costly, and you might need to pay extra. I had to set aside some money for billing.

8. Payments: Stripe, Polar, Dodo Payments—pretty standard stuff.

9. Support emails: Zoho (I find it really useful that you can have a primary inbox and aliases; it costs just $1/month).

10. Speech-to-text tool: VoxBee (created by me, available for MacOS and Linux). I used WisprFlow, but its monthly subscription is quite costly, and I highly value speech privacy. Using speech-to-text has greatly boosted my productivity. If you haven't tried it yet, give VoxBee a try.

11. Databases: Neon (easy to set up, free 0.5GB per project). Pretty soon, I will need to switch to a paid plan since I expect the DB size to grow.

12. Analytics & SEO: Google Analytics for Webpages, Ahrefs (I’m on a $20 Ahrefs subscription and haven't used it extensively yet, but we’ll see), PostHog for client-side telemetry.

13. Apple Developer account: VoxBee is available on macOS, so you need this if building for macOS. It costs $99/year.

14. Domains: Vercel domains.

I haven’t really started using any marketing or video-making tools yet, but I know there is CapCut.

If you are a fellow solo builder or founder, what tools are you using to build and improve productivity? Share your stack in comments.