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Aaron Brick curates the ShipGarden gallery, where we test open-source building blocks so we can own the stack that funds the life.
Curator review of Twenty CRM v2.14.0 (June 2026): the open-source Salesforce alternative now with built-in AI agents. Four fork lanes for the solo founder.
Mastra is the open-source TypeScript agent framework hitting 25.2k GitHub stars and v1.42.0 (June 12, 2026). We curated its starter into a gallery entry with three real deploy paths: clone the repo, one-click on Vercel, or ship as a deployable Next.js app via Totalum. Trade-offs in plain English, no hand-waving.
For a solo founder shipping in 2026 we'd reach for Next.js on the front, a managed data-and-files backend like TotalumSDK, Stripe for billing, and Better Auth for sessions, all live on the edge in an afternoon. It's boring on purpose: every piece is replaceable, documented, and cheap until you have real users. Skip the microservices, ship the monolith. Here's the exact wiring and the two places it bites.
An AI agent app is six moving parts: a Next.js shell, a model SDK, a tool-calling layer, a durable job runner for long tasks, a vector store for memory, and a streaming UI. Wire those and you can ship something genuinely useful in a weekend. The hard part isn't the model; it's the plumbing around it that keeps a slow, flaky call from taking your whole app down. Here's the stack and the four traps that eat the most time.
A two-sided marketplace doesn't need a big budget to launch; it needs the right five pieces. We'd run Next.js, a managed data layer for listings and uploads, Stripe Connect for split payments, lightweight search, and signed image URLs, and keep the whole thing under $200 a month until volume justifies more. The trap isn't the tech bill; it's payments compliance and trust. Here's the stack and where the real costs hide.
