The 14-day target
Two weeks is the right deadline for a SaaS MVP. Shorter and you ship a toy. Longer and you start designing for hypothetical users instead of real ones. The stack below has carried multiple Beusoft client products from idea to first paying customer inside that window.
The toolkit
- Framework: Next.js 15 with React Server Components (a single repo for marketing site + app).
- Auth: Clerk or Better Auth — never roll your own at this stage.
- Database: Postgres on Neon or Supabase. SQLite via Turso for the truly minimal builds.
- Payments: Stripe Checkout + Stripe Customer Portal. Skip custom billing UIs for v1.
- Email: Resend for transactional, Loops for lifecycle.
- Hosting: Vercel for the app, Cloudflare for everything else.
- Analytics: PostHog for product, Plausible for marketing site.
- AI layer (optional but increasingly default): Claude Haiku 4.5 + Vercel AI SDK for any in-product intelligence.
What you build in each phase
- Days 1-3: Marketing page, waitlist, Stripe checkout (yes, before the product).
- Days 4-9: Core feature loop — the one thing the product does, end to end. Nothing else.
- Days 10-12: Auth, billing, onboarding, basic emails.
- Days 13-14: Polish, error handling, instrumentation. Ship.
What to ruthlessly cut from v1
- Team accounts and roles. Single-user only.
- Custom dashboards and reporting.
- Mobile app. Mobile web is enough.
- Multi-tenant theming. One look.
- SSO. Email + password (or magic link) is fine.
The AI choice you cannot avoid in 2026
Even if your product is not "an AI product", customers now expect at least one moment of useful AI inside it — a summary, a draft, a smart default. Build that one moment. It costs you maybe a day on the schedule and roughly doubles the demo conversion rate of a product without it.
What this stack actually costs
For a typical pre-revenue MVP serving up to ~200 daily users: under $80/month. Most of that is Vercel and Stripe. Database and analytics are free at this scale.
We build SaaS MVPs end-to-end on this exact stack. Book a discovery call if you want a 14-day sprint scoped this week.