The stack

The destination, not a stepping stone.

PHP, SQLite, jQuery, and one cheap VPS isn't the thing you use until you get "real." It's what real, profitable products already run on. One codebase, one file, one bill — and a surface you still understand at 2am.

SQLite reads 50k+/sec

Tens of thousands of queries per second from a single file — no network hop, no connection pool, no separate DB box.

Concurrency Reads never block

WAL mode lets every reader run while a write is in flight. Writes are serialized and commit in well under a millisecond.

Amazon SES is $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Ten thousand passwordless logins a month costs $1.

Proof, not theory

Indie products make real money on lean stacks.

@levelsio builds in public on X and runs profitable products — Nomad List, Remote OK, Photo AI and more — on PHP, SQLite, jQuery, and a cheap VPS per project. You don't need a heavy stack to charge real money. And the SQLite team themselves note it comfortably powers sites doing 100k+ hits a day — the database was never the constraint.

Keep

The parts that buy speed

PHP for pages, forms, APIs, and webhooks — fast to write, instant to deploy.
SQLite as the primary database. It is not a toy; it is the most-deployed database on earth.
jQuery for DOM work and AJAX, with zero build step.
One Hetzner Cloud VPS — under $10/month — with NGINX, PHP-FPM, and cron backups.

Avoid

The parts that buy complexity

Premature microservices and message queues.
Frontend build pipelines and hydration for server-rendered pages.
Auth providers and password databases you have to babysit.
Abstractions that slow iteration down without paying rent.

The rule

Make the common path boring, so the product can be interesting.

Every site reuses the same login, payments, deploy shape, backups, and webhook conventions. You change the product idea, not the plumbing — whether you're vibe-coding a weekend tool or running a serious, revenue-generating SaaS.