I've spent the past few months working on AI image generation tooling, and a lot of friends have asked me what stack I'd use if I were starting fresh in 2026. Here's the honest answer, with the gotchas I hit along the way.

This isn't theoretical — it's based on what I've seen working in production at Nano AI (a free Nano Banana Pro workbench) and what I'd build into the next product.

The Stack

Layer Choice Why

Frontend Next.js 15 (App Router) + Tailwind Boring, fast, server components for SEO

Auth NextAuth OAuth (Google/GitHub) covers 95% of users

DB PostgreSQL (Supabase or Neon) Free tier covers MVP, scales when needed

Image Model Nano Banana Pro / SDXL fallback Cost per image determines unit economics

Storage Cloudflare R2 S3-compatible, 10x cheaper for image-heavy apps

Payment Stripe Don't reinvent this

Hosting Vercel (frontend) + Cloudflare Workers (image proxy) Edge for cold starts

Analytics PostHog (self-hosted) Privacy-friendly, full event control

Total monthly fixed cost at MVP scale:…