The Tech Stack that Works for My (AI) Startups
Last updated in Feb. 2024
In this post, I list the tech stack and related services that support our products at Takin.ai and HiddenArt.ai and the things we tried but did not work.
Frontend
- Next.js/TypeScript hosted on Vercel:
- Pages Router (Old) vs. App Router (New): we used Pages router for one project and App Router for another project. It does not matter that much for the features I use so far - pick the one that your existing developers are most comfortable with and use a small project to push the team to learn the new features related to App Router
- tRPC: tried but did not use given my team is not familiar with this and I am not sure about the additional benefits
- TailwindCSS for CSS
- Hero Icons: SVG icons
- PlayWright for front-end testing
Note that we use Nextjs monorepo to include projects on API, Blog, Admin, Gallery, etc.
Backend
- MongoDB Atlas for serverless database
- Qdrant: we used Qdrant to develop ChatPDF like features but switched to Weaviate for serverless - Qdrant has no serverless option and cannot be easily scaled down.
- Weaviate: our current vector database (Serverless Cloud Service)
- ElasticSearch for searching functions
- AWS S3 for cloud object storage
- FastAPI for Python backend
- AWS Fargate for hosting FastAPI backend in serverless
- OpenAI API for AI functions (both GPT 3.5 and 4)
- LangChain for jumpstarting some PoC projects but not used for many products due to the extra unnecessary complexity for our scenarios.
- Huggingface for data and model storage and some LLM integration such chatting using Llama 2
- AWS GPU: we started with AWS GPU G4 instances - way too expensive - bought some reserved instances to help but ended up using Runpod for cheaper price and easier setup.
- Runpod for Stable Diffusion backend hosting (great Stable Diffusion WebUI docker templates to choose from). We are in the process to switch to Runpod serverless.
- Replicate: we tested a few APIs but have not integrated them with our systems yet.
- A1111 Stable Diffusion WebUI: our SD backend running in the API mode.
Code
Github for everything: code management and collaboration, issues, CI/CD
Data Collection
- Scrapy for Python Scraper. See my tutorial: A Minimalist End-to-End Scrapy Tutorial
- Zyte for hosting Scrapy spiders and avoiding banning.
Analytics
- Google Analytics for site analytics
- MongoDB Charts for basic BI dashboards
Payment
Stripe for everything related to payment
Dev Tools
CMS
Headless Wordpress hosted on SiteGround - see my other related post on Headless Wordpress + Next.js + ElasticSearch for more details.
Domain Names
I register all my domains mainly from the following websites - NameCheap is cheaper with additional features. The DNS servers are then changed to SiteGround to use company email service and CMS.
- SiteGround for free company emails, such as support@takin.ai - see my other related post on Setup Websites using SiteGround for more details.
- AWS SES for programmatic email service
Misc Tools
Hope this can provide some useful information for you.
PS. The featured image for this post is generated using HiddenArt.ai.