Why I build with open source first

Most of the stack behind the projects I ship is open source — Next.js, PostgreSQL, Tailwind, the works. That's not a purity thing. It's a practical one, and it comes from getting burned a few times.

The pitch nobody makes explicitly

Proprietary platforms are easy to adopt and hard to leave. The lock-in isn't malicious, it's just gravity — every integration you build makes migrating later more expensive, until one day the vendor changes pricing or shuts down a feature you depend on, and you have no leverage.

What open source actually buys you

• You can read the code. When something breaks in production at 11pm, being able to step into the actual source instead of waiting on a support ticket is the difference between a 20-minute fix and a lost night.
• No pricing surprises. Self-hosted Postgres doesn't send you an email announcing a 40% price increase next quarter.
• The ecosystem compounds. Popular open source tools accumulate plugins, integrations and Stack Overflow answers faster than closed ecosystems ever do.

# the boring, reliable stack
next.js + postgres + supabase (open source core) + tailwind

This isn't dogma — sometimes a proprietary tool is genuinely the right call for a client's timeline or budget. But it has to earn that spot. The default is open source, and something has to justify moving away from it.