Choosing a tech stack: what actually matters vs. what's just trendy

Founders often come to us with a specific framework already in mind, usually because they read it was fast or saw it trending. The framework matters less than most people assume — the decisions around it matter more.

What we actually weigh: how the site will be hosted and by whom long-term, whether content needs to be editable without a developer, how much of the app is genuinely interactive versus static content, and who's going to maintain it after we hand it off.

For most marketing sites and small-to-medium products, Next.js hits the right balance of speed, SEO, and developer availability if you ever need to bring in someone else later. For more app-like products, the calculus shifts toward what the team already knows.

The honest answer is that almost any modern stack can be made fast and any of them can be made slow — the architecture decisions around it matter more than the label on the box.