Comparisons

Check the country list before you design anything. Stripe is fully launched in 48 countries, India and Indonesia are in beta, and several African markets are served through Paystack rather than Stripe itself. Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, and Vietnam are on none of those lists, so a company incorporated there cannot open a Stripe account at all. Accepting a customer's card is not the problem; getting paid out is.

Alternative wins when your company is incorporated outside Stripe's 48 launched countries, or you want tax handled for you.

Paddle Billing if you need payouts outside the Stripe Connect countries (Paddle pays by wire or Payoneer) or the widest tax coverage; the 5% + $0.50 fee is all-in with no international surcharge. Usage pricing is done as flat tiers plus one-time credit products and reported through the subscription charge endpoint.

Alternative wins when you are in a Stripe Connect country, want usage metering built in, and prefer an open-source vendor.

Drizzle. The schema is TypeScript you can read, queries look like the SQL they become, the runtime adds about 20 KB with no engine to warm up, and migrations are plain SQL files you can review in a PR.

Alternative wins when your team is new to SQL and wants Prisma Studio and the generated client more than control over queries.

Coolify v4.3.18 if you want a UI: Apache-2.0, 61k stars, and it drives Docker over SSH so the same install manages several servers. Plain Docker Swarm on Docker 29.8.0 if you would rather own the compose file: `docker stack deploy` plus a Caddy or Traefik service is roughly eighty lines and nothing sits between you and the daemon. Dokploy v0.30.5 is the same idea as Coolify on Swarm, with a smaller team behind it.

Alternative wins when you already run Swarm and want a UI that speaks services and replicas rather than containers.

Next.js 16.3.4 if the app is mostly logged-in screens: server components, the largest hiring pool, and Turbopack on by default for both dev and build. Astro 7.3.1 if most pages are content and only a few islands are interactive, because it ships no JS for the rest. SvelteKit 2.70.3 is the smallest runtime of the three, but v3 is in prerelease and rewrites the adapter API, so custom adapters will need work.

Alternative wins when the app is a marketing site, docs, or blog with a small logged-in area bolted on.

Fumadocs 16.15.8 if the docs live inside an existing Next.js app, because it is Next.js components rather than a separate site and you share the layout, the fonts, and the deploy. Starlight 0.42.0 if the docs are their own site: Astro ships almost no JS, and i18n, search, and the sidebar are configuration. Docusaurus 3.10.2 is the safe institutional choice with the deepest plugin and versioning story.

Alternative wins when you need versioned docs for several released product versions, or a translation pipeline that exists.

Postgres 18.6. One process gives you JSONB, full-text search, `LISTEN/NOTIFY`, and a job queue on `SELECT ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED`, so a solo app can go a long way before it needs a second service. SQLite 3.53.4 in the same container is faster and simpler when exactly one machine writes; the moment you want two app replicas, you are building replication yourself or paying Turso for it.

Alternative wins when one machine does all the writing, or you want a separate small database per tenant.

Use the provider SDK directly when you call one model: @anthropic-ai/sdk 0.124.0 is a thin client over the API, so every feature lands the day it ships and nothing is translated. Reach for the AI SDK 7.0.93 when you need one interface across providers, streaming into React, or structured output with a schema. Both are reasonable; the AI SDK costs you an abstraction that lags each provider's newest options.

Alternative wins when you want prebuilt retrieval and agent graphs and accept the dependency and API churn.