What do I need to build it?
Not another list of 500 tools — the exact stack to ship a real thing. Pick a goal and get the recommended stack, MCP servers, UI and starter templates, with cost, complexity and the honest trade-offs.

Build a CRM
A custom CRM your sales team actually wants — no engineers required.
Best for: Founders & sales teams who want a tailored CRM live this week — not a Salesforce bill.
Recommended Stack
Recommended MCP
Recommended UI
Pros
- Live in a day with zero infrastructure to manage.
- Generous free tiers across the whole stack.
- You own a real Postgres database, not a locked SaaS.
Cons
- The builder is opinionated — deep custom logic hits limits.
- Heavy customization eventually needs real code.
- Some lock-in to the no-code builder.

Build a Chat App
Realtime + AI chat with streaming, the way Linear & Vercel ship it.
Best for: Makers adding live chat or an AI assistant to a product — without reinventing streaming.
Recommended Stack
Recommended MCP
Recommended UI
Pros
- Streaming, tool-calls & multi-provider built in.
- Realtime & vector search on a free tier.
- Swap models without rewriting the app.
Cons
- Requires real coding, unlike a no-code builder.
- Token costs scale with conversation length.
- You handle rate-limiting & abuse.

Build a SaaS
The standard, scalable stack behind modern subscription products.
Best for: Devs launching a real product with auth, billing & a database they fully control.
Recommended Stack
Recommended MCP
Recommended UI
Pros
- Battle-tested, hireable stack.
- Scales from MVP to thousands of users.
- You own every layer — no platform lock-in.
Cons
- More wiring than a no-code builder.
- You own billing edge-cases & security.
- Costs grow with usage at scale.

Build an Agent
A tool-using, MCP-ready agent on a TypeScript-native framework.
Best for: Devs building autonomous, tool-calling agents that do real work end to end.
Recommended Stack
Recommended MCP
Recommended UI
Pros
- TypeScript end-to-end — same language as your app.
- MCP-native: plug in tools instantly.
- Durable execution survives crashes & retries.
Cons
- Agent reliability needs evals & guardrails.
- Token costs add up with long loops.
- Observability & tracing are on you.

Build a Knowledge Base
Docs + semantic search + grounded AI answers over your own content.
Best for: Teams turning docs, support & wikis into an answer engine that cites its sources.
Recommended Stack
Recommended MCP
Pros
- Own your data & embeddings end to end.
- Answers cite real sources — far less hallucination.
- Great DX with MDX + built-in search.
Cons
- Ingestion & chunking pipeline to maintain.
- Freshness needs periodic re-indexing.
- Embedding costs scale with corpus size.

Build a Research Agent
A deep-research agent that searches the live web and writes cited reports.
Best for: Teams building answer engines & analysts that browse, read and synthesize at scale.
Recommended Stack
Recommended MCP
Pros
- Grounded, source-cited answers.
- Live web — not stale training data.
- Composable, inspectable multi-step research.
Cons
- Search & scrape APIs cost per query.
- Latency grows on deep runs.
- Needs evals to stay accurate.

Build a Coding Agent
An autonomous coding agent that edits repos in a sandbox — the deep end.
Best for: Power teams building Devin-style agents & dev tooling with real isolation.
Recommended Stack
Recommended MCP
Recommended UI
Pros
- Fully autonomous on real repositories.
- Sandboxed — agent code can’t touch your machine.
- Scales to many parallel agents.
Cons
- Heaviest infrastructure & ops burden.
- Safety & permissioning are critical.
- Highest token + compute cost.

















