Editors, terminals, API clients, databases and hosting. The set of things a small team actually needs to get something on the internet without hiring an operations department.
Free, extensible and the environment most tutorials assume you are using. Extension quality varies wildly, and remote development over SSH or containers is genuinely excellent.
A Rust editor built for speed, with multiplayer editing and AI panels included. The extension ecosystem is young, so check your languages are supported before switching.
Modal editing with Lua configuration and a serious plugin ecosystem. It costs you a week to set up and returns that time for the rest of your career.
A GPU-accelerated terminal that is fast, native on macOS and Linux, and configured with a plain text file. Fewer features than Warp, and considerably less in your way.
Terminal with block-based output, editable command input and AI assistance built in. Divisive because of the account requirement, and a real productivity gain if that does not bother you.
The standard way to get identical environments on your laptop and in production. Desktop licensing for larger companies is the part that catches teams out.
The most complete API client, with collections, mocks, tests and documentation. It has grown heavy, and it is still the one most teams standardise on.
A lighter API client with good GraphQL and gRPC support. Pick it if Postman feels like it is doing too much.
Open source API client that runs in a browser tab with nothing to install and no account. The one to reach for on a machine you do not own.
The smoothest deployment story for Next.js and front-end frameworks, with preview URLs on every pull request. Watch bandwidth and function costs once a project gets popular.
Static and JAMstack hosting with forms, redirects and edge functions handled for you. Less tied to one framework than Vercel.
Deploys a normal application with a database attached in about five minutes, which makes it the friendliest option for anything that is not serverless. Costs scale with usage, so watch the meter.
Runs containers close to your users in many regions, with real persistent volumes and private networking. More operational thinking required than Railway, and much more control.
Postgres with auth, storage, realtime and generated APIs on top, all open source and self-hostable. The pragmatic backend for a small team that wants to stay on SQL.
Serverless Postgres that scales to zero and branches like git, so every pull request can have its own database. The branching is the feature you will miss elsewhere.
MySQL built on Vitess with safe schema change workflows borrowed from how large companies actually operate. It dropped its free tier, so budget before you start.
DNS, CDN, DDoS protection, Workers, R2 storage and tunnels, with a free tier that covers a surprising amount of real production traffic. R2 charges nothing for egress, which is why people move there from S3.
Code hosting plus Actions, Packages and issues, and the place your dependencies already live. Actions minutes on private repositories are the line item that grows quietly.
Issue tracking that is fast enough to actually keep updated, with keyboard-first navigation throughout. Opinionated, so teams that want to model every process will fight it.