Why I'm Choosing Cloudflare and TanStack for My Side Projects

I like building side projects. They’re how I learn new tools, test ideas, and stay sharp outside of work. Over the past year I’ve gone through a few stacks trying to find the right balance between developer experience, cost, and simplicity. I started with Vercel and Supabase. I ended up on Cloudflare and TanStack. This post is about why. What I moved away from Vercel is genuinely excellent for development. The deployment workflow, preview environments, and Next.js integration are top-notch. For a team shipping a product, it makes a lot of sense. But for side projects the free tier is limited, and the moment you need anything beyond it - more bandwidth, analytics, or team features - the Pro plan jumps to $20/month per member. That adds up fast when you’re just experimenting.