HTMX + Django

The ecosystem-standard third-party package for Django authentication, adding social login (Google, GitHub, and dozens more), email verification, and MFA on top of Django's own built-in auth system. The default here because it's what most Django projects reach for once they need more than basic username/password sessions.

A hosted identity platform with an official Python SDK for verifying sessions in Django views and middleware, worth it over django-allauth if you'd rather not self-host the auth logic at all, or need enterprise features like SSO that django-allauth doesn't cover.

A transactional email API for account verification, password resets, and notification emails, sent via Resend's official Python SDK from a Django view, with a free tier for getting started.

The established high-volume choice, with dedicated IP addresses and deliverability tooling for apps sending at serious scale. No permanent free plan (a 60-day trial, then paid tiers), so it earns its slot when volume and deliverability matter more than upfront cost.

An all-in-one platform combining the transactional email API with marketing campaigns, a built-in CRM, and SMS from the same dashboard. A permanent free tier of 300 emails a day with no card required makes it an easy starting pick for an early-stage app.

Adds subscription billing, one-time checkout, and invoicing via Stripe's hosted Checkout or embedded Elements, with Django handling webhook verification and API calls server-side. The stack works fully without it; add this once the product is ready to charge for something.

A utility-class CSS framework: styles are composed directly in markup via class names instead of writing separate stylesheet files. The default styling choice bundled by most modern framework CLIs (create-next-app, create-vue, the SvelteKit and Astro starters all offer it), and the base layer shadcn/ui components are built on when that's loaded into the catalog in the future.

Ready-made components and a grid for Django templates, with the crispy-forms Bootstrap 5 pack rendering forms and their validation errors in Bootstrap markup. A common choice for admin-style interfaces. Pick it or Tailwind, since the two overlap on spacing and layout classes.

Alpine.js adds lightweight, declarative client-side interactivity on top of this stack's HTMX-driven Django pages: toggling a mobile menu, showing a modal, or switching an active tab, all without triggering a server round trip HTMX would otherwise need. It is included via a script tag, with behavior written as HTML attributes (x-data, x-show, x-on) rather than a build step, keeping the stack's zero-bundler approach intact.

S3-compatible object storage with no egress fees, so serving uploads, images, and exports costs only for storage and operations. Django reaches it through django-storages' S3 backend with a custom endpoint where needed, so FileField and ImageField uploads land in the bucket instead of the server disk, and the keys stay in Django settings. The 10 GB free tier covers an early product.

The reference object store and the API the others copy, with the most storage classes, regional controls, and lifecycle rules. Django reaches it through django-storages' S3 backend with a custom endpoint where needed, so FileField and ImageField uploads land in the bucket instead of the server disk, and the keys stay in Django settings. It fits best when the rest of the app already runs on AWS, though data transfer out is billed.

An S3-compatible store at roughly a third of S3 Standard's storage price, a fit for backups and large media libraries. Django reaches it through django-storages' S3 backend with a custom endpoint where needed, so FileField and ImageField uploads land in the bucket instead of the server disk, and the keys stay in Django settings. Egress is free up to three times the stored data, and a CDN in front of a public bucket covers heavier delivery.

Django's cache framework with django-redis as the backend: cache_page caches whole views, the cache template tag caches fragments of the partials HTMX swaps in, and sessions can live in Redis instead of the database. Configuring it is one CACHES entry in settings. PostgreSQL already keeps frequently read data in memory, so add Redis when the same pages and fragments are rendered often enough to show up in response times.

Django 6.0's built-in Tasks framework lets views enqueue background work, but it ships no production worker. Celery is the established one: an HTMX request queues a task and returns a progress fragment at once, the fragment polls until the worker finishes, and delay_on_commit makes sure the task runs only after the database transaction commits. django-celery-beat keeps schedules editable in the Django admin. Celery needs a broker, usually Redis (the instance used for caching can serve both), or RabbitMQ.

Runs the test suite and triggers deployments on every push, directly from the same GitHub repo the code already lives in, with no separate CI service to configure.

GitLab's built-in CI/CD system, configured via .gitlab-ci.yml in the repository, the natural pick if the project's code lives on GitLab (self-hosted or gitlab.com) rather than GitHub, with the same YAML-pipeline model as GitHub Actions.

Packages the whole Django + HTMX app into a container image for consistent local development and deployment, independent of the hosting platform chosen above.

Error tracking and performance monitoring with a dedicated Sentry Django integration, covering both view-level errors and template-rendering issues. Open-source with a self-hosted path, alongside its own managed cloud.

A broader observability platform covering APM, infrastructure metrics, and log management in one dashboard, useful once a team is already running other services worth monitoring alongside this app. Managed-only, with pricing that scales by host and usage rather than Sentry's per-error volume.

An all-in-one product analytics platform: event tracking, session replay, feature flags, and A/B testing in one SDK. The richest feature set if you want more than pageviews.

The industry-standard, free analytics platform, with native Google Ads and Search Console integration. Requires a cookie consent banner in most jurisdictions (GDPR/CCPA), and all data lives on Google's infrastructure, the tradeoff the other three picks were built to avoid.

A lightweight, privacy-first analytics tool with no cookie banner required. A good fit for simple traffic metrics without PostHog's broader feature surface.

Open-source and self-hostable, keeping analytics data on infrastructure you control. Pairs naturally with the self-hosted Hetzner hosting option above if you want to avoid a third-party analytics vendor entirely.