What web tech stack are folks choosing for seed stage startups today?

For the past 8 years, we have mainly used Elixir. It is good for building straightforward web apps and APIs and great for more tricky things like chat. We also use Ruby on Rails, mostly for existing projects.

A lot of the initial work of building MVPs does not need to be fancy, it's just CRUD. Traditional frameworks are great for that. We also use React where it makes sense. The JavaScript world has a lot of accidental complexity that slows you down and doesn't add much value. Tools like Phoenix LiveView are great for adding fancy UI without overhead.

For mobile, products need a first-class user experience, and getting access to native platform functionality can be critical for some apps. Because of this, we have historically done native development. React Native is the first framework that is really competitive, but it still has its weaknesses. React Native may allow you to share code between platforms and use web people for native work, but it can result in somewhat generic apps. If you follow the "full stack teams, not developers" approach, then speed and cost of development of native is fine. After the initial development phase, the bulk of development work ends up being on the web.

For simple web sites it's still hard to beat PHP for simplicity and ease of deployment, and since it dominates web development by a wide margin you can find developers.

For building apps (mobile? desktop?) you are constrained by the tools intended for the platform -- Swift, Java, C# -- unless you have the expertise and time to do your own thing or work with a cross-platform development tool.

For simple web sites WordPress is the almost "no code" solution. Inelegant and definitely not sexy, but gets the job done, zero to web site in a few days.

It is as close to nocode as you can get. It has sane defaults, Hosting is cheaper than coffee.

The default setup is faster than Django and rails, and with swoole it can handle way more requests than node. But yeah none of this should matter. Go with something you and your team is comfortable with.

Also from my experience your location might be important too, Django/Ruby if you are in the US, PHP or Node or C like languages for the rest of the world. But with remote work, that might not matter as well.

Or the obligatory "the stack you already know".

Worrying about your tech stack is one of those procrastination traps like fiddling with your development environment too much rather than writing code.

What's more important is the architecture. It doesn't need to be complicated, but sane enough for you to break it down later in case you want to grow.

it can help you quickly launch landing pages and saas/webapp boilerplates

iOS and Android apps are Flutter, but most of the heavy lifting is still done by the Rails backend.

In my case for OnlineOrNot it was Next.js (boring old Node.js + TypeScript + React).