The tools we actually use

Laravel gets picked for anything that needs auth, queues and an ORM working together quickly — not because it's fashionable, but because it removes a week of plumbing every custom app needs anyway. React and Next.js cover most frontends because the hiring pool and the ecosystem are both deep, which matters once a project outlives its first release.

PostgreSQL is the default database unless a client is already committed to MySQL — its constraint handling and indexing hold up better once a schema has forty migrations behind it. Redis handles queues and caching rather than trying to make the primary database do both jobs.

We used to default to Zapier for every automation request. We still use it for genuinely small, single-step jobs, but anything with branching logic or error handling moved to self-hosted n8n — Zapier's per-task pricing gets expensive fast once volume grows, and debugging a failed multi-step Zap is worse than it should be.

We also stopped building brand-new WordPress sites on page builders. They're fine for a client who will only ever edit text, but the moment a project needs a genuinely custom section, a hand-built theme is faster to extend and doesn't carry a page builder's runtime weight on every page load.