Our Lean Startup Tech Stack (2026) – And Why I Fired Slack

I’ve always tried to keep a lean tech stack for my startup.

This means finding the best tools that do the job—cleaner, easier, and faster. And also cancel the ones that don’t.

Without further ado, here’s my tech stack for 2026.

ClickUp (new)

Team chats, channels, tasks, projects, and documents. All interconnected.

ClickUp made a breakthrough in features last year.

My best tech decision this year was to move to ClickUp—great value for money.

Slack (cancelled)

Slack is chaos, and they are greedy.

My team and I were Slack users. But no more!

Moving to ClickUp took effort and discipline, but when your docs, team members, tasks, and messages are interconnected, the real business starts.

Loom

Working with 10+ people across India, Pakistan, Serbia, Ukraine, Spain, and the USA requires a lot of async communication.

Loom is my best time saver.

I’m a bit concerned they were acquired by Atlassian and could raise prices or cut support quality, but so far, so good.

Fathom (new)

Fathom is an LLM-driven notetaker and call summarizer.

My calls are a mix of Ukrainian, Russian, and English.

Fathom handles context and extracts action points from our calls really well.

FatGrid (new)

Building backlinks for our own websites and our clients became a priority this year, and we developed this product as its largest user.

Mailjet (new)

I personally researched 50 email marketing tools.

Mailjet has the best balance between price and value, plus pretty good support.

Postmark (cancelled)

Nothing bad about them.

Mailjet is just better.

Claude Code (new)

Absolute game changer in our development. NOT using LLM-driven coding tools in 2026 is business suicide.

It makes me a decent developer and multiplies our lead dev by x3.

OpenAI

Paying for API, Whisper, and the desktop app.

It’s just a cornerstone of my business processes. Helps me to communicate better and more briefly by making me more focused and removing a lot of routine.

I’ll publish my three best prompts separately.

Cloudflare

A few LLM API agents, plus website protection.

They are a leader in this niche. Must have.

Semrush

I can’t live my professional life without it.

Website audits, keyword research, AI visibility tracking, backlinks research, traffic analytics, you name it. All things SEO.

Ahrefs

My second choice in everything SEO-related, plus my personal favorite – their graph combining backlinks, number of pages, and traffic in one view.

The fastest way to understand any website’s performance.

DataForSEO (new)

We use them in several integrations, and they are really great.

I’m surprised they haven’t been purchased by any large SEO tool yet.

Stripe

Our main payments provider.

Wise

Large payments worldwide with low commissions.

PayPal

Link builders #1 choice for small payments. So we use it too.

Hetzner

The best value in price/performance for hosting.

Google Workspace

E-mails and calendars.

Google Workspace’s market monopoly is slowly disrupted by ClickUp and others, but it still has years of guaranteed profits.

Originality AI

Checking plagiarism, AI-generated content, and fact-checking for the sources’ quality.

Must-have if you work with written content of any sort.

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