u/AncientPomelo5450

Never written code seriously in my life but I have been vibe coding with Claude and Cursor for the past couple of years and honestly the things you can build without formal training still surprise me.

So far I have shipped:

• A Discord bot that manages a community, distributes survey tasks automatically, and handles response tracking with reaction based verification
• A full AI assistant bot for my friend group server with per user memory, passive message collection across all channels, keyword alerts, and a sarcastic personality that actually makes people laugh
• An algorithmic crypto trading bot with EMA crossover and RSI signals running on live exchange data with a terminal dashboard
• A personal portfolio and agency website

All of this with zero formal programming background. Just describing what I want and iterating until it works.

Now I am working on something new. A niche sticker store selling anime, movies and aesthetic quote designs targeting international buyers. Still early stage but I have the stack mapped out and looking for advice before I go too deep.

Here is my planned stack so far:

Frontend:

React + Vite, Claude keeps suggesting this and it seems solid for what I need. Tailwind CSS for styling and Framer Motion for animations since I want the store to feel premium without hiring a designer.

Backend:

Node.js + Express with SQLite for now. Zustand for state management on the frontend. Will probably migrate the database as it scales but keeping it simple for now.

Payments:

Stripe, straightforward for international buyers.

Emails:

Resend for transactional emails, order confirmations and delivery notifications. Seems like the cleanest option for a solo builder.

Images:

Cloudinary for product image storage and optimization. Do not want to deal with slow loading product images killing conversion rate.

Design:

Canva for all product mockups and store assets.

SEO and content:

EarlySEO for automated blog content since niche sticker stores live on long tail search traffic like "aesthetic anime stickers" or "minimalist movie quote stickers" and I cannot write 30 articles a month while also building the product. Faurya for revenue and traffic attribution so I know from day one which channel is actually converting and not just sending visitors.

Hosting:

Vercel, free tier should handle early traffic fine.

The vibe coding process has been genuinely eye opening. I describe what I want, AI builds it, something breaks, I figure out why, and I actually understand it better each time. Way faster than following tutorials honestly.

A few things I am still figuring out:

• Best way to handle product delivery for stickers, downloadable files vs print on demand
• Whether SQLite will cause problems early on or if I should just start with Postgres
• How aggressive to be with SEO content from day one on a brand new domain
• Whether React + Vite is overkill for a simple store or if it is the right call long term
• Whether Cloudinary free tier is enough early on or if there is a better image solution

Anyone who has built something similar or has thoughts on the stack, would love the feedback. Still early enough to change direction on anything.