The 2026 maker stack: what 6,568 SaaS and AI products are built with

We track 6,568 makers' products — from indie launches to small funded teams — and 17,634 sourced facts about what they're built with. Most of the evidence is the maker's own words (9,644 pieces) or something seen on the live product: its pages, DNS records or headers (7,700). The rest comes from subprocessor lists (1,226), customer stories (179) and job posts (219).

Each percentage below is a share of the products where we could source that decision, so the sample changes from section to section.

Frontend: Next.js is the default, and Astro is growing faster

Next.js1512 · 73%Astro242 · 12%React239 · 12%Vue.js67 · 3%Svelte43 · 2%Nuxt30 · 1%

Next.js runs 73% of the 2,060 products whose frontend we know. It's also the easiest framework to spot from outside, so treat that as an upper bound. The momentum is with Astro: its downloads grew 1.9× as fast as the median package over the last year, against 1.1× for Next.js, and we found 178 pull requests titled “Next.js to Astro”.

Hosting: most products sit on a frontend cloud

Vercel1821 · 56%Amazon Web Services425 · 13%Cloudflare377 · 12%Netlify239 · 7%Google Cloud Platform186 · 6%DigitalOcean141 · 4%

66% of the 3,243 products whose host we know run on a frontend cloud, and Vercel alone hosts 56%. Cloudflare is the one to watch: its downloads grew 3.1× as fast as the median package, and 242 pull requests moved from Vercel to Cloudflare against 83 the other way.

Database: Supabase, by a wide margin

Supabase565 · 45%Firebase180 · 14%MongoDB134 · 11%PostgreSQL108 · 9%Neon95 · 8%Convex50 · 4%

65% of the 1,245 products whose database we know chose a backend platform — database, auth and storage in one — over a bare database. Supabase leads it at 45%, against 14% for Firebase.

One caveat: many of Supabase's users come from reviews on its own Product Hunt page, which it actively asks for. Leave every review out and Supabase still leads Firebase 2.2 to 1. Pull requests point the same way: 297 moved from Firebase to Supabase, 113 the other way. The fastest grower is Convex, at 5.5× the median package.

Auth: what you can see is hosted

Clerk305 · 77%Auth021 · 5%WorkOS20 · 5%Supabase13 · 3%Better Auth7 · 2%

Clerk shows up in 77% of the 395 products whose auth we know — but read that carefully. A hosted auth service leaves traces on a website; an auth library inside the app leaves none. Better Auth, a library, grew 8.4× as fast as the median package. More on auth, and what it costs at 100k users.

Payments: Stripe, plus a merchant of record for one in five

Stripe895 · 76%PayPal94 · 8%Paddle82 · 7%Lemon Squeezy80 · 7%Polar50 · 4%Dodo Payments30 · 3%

Stripe takes payments for 76% of 1,178 products. 20% use a merchant of record — Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar and others — which sells on your behalf and handles sales tax and VAT. Polar is growing 2.5× as fast as the median package. How makers take payments, and what each option costs.

Transactional email: SendGrid's installed base, Resend's momentum

SendGrid1052 · 48%Resend940 · 43%Postmark610 · 28%Mailgun46 · 2%Amazon SES5 · 0%

Most of these 2,206 come from DNS records, and a DNS record can outlive a switch. The trend is clearer than the snapshot: Resend's downloads grew 4.1× as fast as the median package, SendGrid's 0.7×. Among AI products Resend already leads, 52% to 40%.

Model APIs

OpenAI API734 · 74%Claude252 · 25%Gemini API99 · 10%OpenRouter61 · 6%Groq39 · 4%

OpenAI is in 74% of the 992 products that show a model API, Claude in 25%. Claude's SDK grew 4.1× as fast as the median package, OpenAI's 1.6×. What AI products are built with, in more detail.

The agent that writes the code

Claude Code741 · 52%Cursor543 · 38%OpenAI Codex136 · 10%Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf)43 · 3%OpenCode42 · 3%

Of 1,422 products whose makers say how they code, 52% use Claude Code and 38% Cursor — almost all of it in the makers' own words.

AI products build a little differently

Set the 992 products that call a model API against the rest:

More of them run on a big cloud, and more of them start from the newest defaults. Their database is the one thing that doesn't change.

If you want the default stack

Next.js on Vercel, Supabase, Stripe, and OpenAI or Claude: the most common pick at each step, which makes them the best documented and the easiest for an AI coding agent to work with. For email, add Resend — not yet the most common, but the one makers are moving to. It isn't automatically right for you: plan a stack for your situation, or start from a stack for shipping an AI SaaS this weekend.

Every count links to its sources on the tool's page. A tool that rarely shows from outside — a library, a vector database, tracing — is under-counted, not unused. How evidence is collected.