HTMX + Laravel

Laravel's official headless authentication backend: registration, email verification, password reset, and two-factor authentication out of the box, wired into Laravel's own Auth facade. The default here because it's what most Laravel projects reach for once they need more than the framework's bare guards and providers.

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

A transactional email API for account verification, password resets, and notification emails, sent via Resend's official Laravel package, which plugs into Laravel's own Mail facade, 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 Laravel 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 Blade templates, a long-standing choice in Laravel projects and available through the laravel/ui package, which can scaffold Bootstrap-styled auth views. Laravel's official starter kits ship with Tailwind, so Bootstrap means setting up the Vite build yourself. Pick it or Tailwind, not both.

Alpine.js is the client-side half of Laravel's own official TALL stack (Tailwind, Alpine, Laravel, Livewire) and ships by default in the Breeze and Jetstream starter kits, so most Laravel + HTMX projects already have it a composer create-project away. It handles local UI state (toggles, modals, dropdowns) that does not need a server round trip, leaving HTMX free to handle the parts that do.

S3-compatible object storage with no egress fees, so serving uploads, images, and exports costs only for storage and operations. Laravel's s3 filesystem disk, built on Flysystem's S3 adapter, accepts a custom endpoint, so Storage::put and temporaryUrl work unchanged and the keys stay in .env. 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. Laravel's s3 filesystem disk, built on Flysystem's S3 adapter, accepts a custom endpoint, so Storage::put and temporaryUrl work unchanged and the keys stay in .env. 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. Laravel's s3 filesystem disk, built on Flysystem's S3 adapter, accepts a custom endpoint, so Storage::put and temporaryUrl work unchanged and the keys stay in .env. Egress is free up to three times the stored data, and a CDN in front of a public bucket covers heavier delivery.

Laravel's Cache facade on its built-in Redis driver: Cache::remember stores rendered Blade partials and slow query results that HTMX requests fetch again and again, and the session and queue drivers can share the same Redis. Switching is CACHE_STORE=redis plus a connection in config/database.php. PostgreSQL already serves hot rows from memory, so add Redis when repeated fragment renders begin to slow responses.

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 Laravel + 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-laravel SDK, covering both HTTP requests and queued jobs. 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.