I Built a Free Quran Web App with the SERN Stack — Here's What I Learned

A few months ago, I asked myself a simple question:

Why isn't there a clean, fast, ad-free Quran web app built with modern tech?

Most existing apps are either bloated, filled with ads, or haven't been updated in years. As a Muslim developer, this bothered me. So I built one.

Meet Al-Quran Hub — a free, non-profit Quran web application built with the SERN stack (Supabase, Express, React, Node.js).

Here's everything I learned shipping it to production.

🧱 Why the SERN Stack?

I wanted:

A real database with row-level security (not just a JSON file)

A proper REST API I control

A fast React frontend with clean routing

Zero vendor lock-in for the core logic

Supabase gave me a PostgreSQL database with an auto-generated REST layer, but I still built my own Express API on top of it for flexibility.…