The Tech Stack Behind a One-Person Creative Studio in 2026

WBX Creative runs on Adobe Creative Cloud for design, Next.js on Vercel for the studio site, Supabase under a CRM I built myself, Resend for transactional email, Wave for invoicing and payments, Google Workspace for the business end, GA4, Tag Manager, and Search Console for analytics, GitHub for source, Cloudflare for DNS, and Claude Code for most of the development and content operations. Client work adds Pipedrive, Zoho, HubSpot, Microsoft 365, and Ubiquiti networking, plus one Astro site on Cloudflare Pages.

At list prices as of September 2026, the commercial-plan floor for that stack is about $162 a month before payment fees and overages. That figure is arithmetic from the vendors' pricing pages, not my bill, and the table below shows where each dollar goes.

The list is short on purpose. A one-person studio needs a small number of tools it knows well enough to fix at 11 p.m. before a launch.

What it is

Layer	Tool	Used for	Plan a commercial studio needs (list, September 2026)
Design	Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, XD, Premiere, After Effects) and Adobe Express	Identity, wraps, print, menus, video, mockups	Creative Cloud Pro, $69.99/mo on an annual plan; Standard is $54.99
Site framework	Next.js 15.5.26, React 19.1, TypeScript 5, Tailwind CSS 3.4, Framer Motion, Fuse.js	wbxcreative.com, the portfolio, the CRM admin, the blog	Open source
Hosting	Vercel (Git integration; pushes to main auto-deploy)	The studio site and its API routes	Pro, $20 per seat/mo plus $20 usage credit; Hobby is non-commercial only
DNS	Cloudflare	DNS for the studio; Pages for The Outpost	Free plan for DNS
Database and CRM	Supabase	The CRM schema, reached through PostgREST	Pro, $25 per org/mo; Free pauses after a week of inactivity and has no backups
Transactional email	Resend	Contact-form notifications, CRM email	Free is 3,000 emails/mo and 100/day; Pro $20 for 50,000
Payments	Wave	Invoices clients pay from the email's Review & Pay button	Not counted in the $162 floor
Business email and files	Google Workspace	Mail, calendar, Drive	Business Starter, $7 per user/mo annual
Analytics	GA4, Google Tag Manager, Search Console	Key events, queries, indexing; running on client work, with the studio site's own install in progress as of September 2026	Free
Source	GitHub, with the gh CLI	Private repos, Actions for The Outpost	Free: unlimited private repos, 2,000 Actions minutes
AI	Claude Code (Fable 5.1)	Agentic development, content operations	Pro $20/mo includes Claude Code; Max $100 or $200 for heavier use
AI images	fal.ai running gpt-image-2	Scenic illustrations, atmosphere only	Priced per image or per megapixel, by model
Client-side	Pipedrive, Zoho, HubSpot; Microsoft 365; Ubiquiti UniFi	Client CRMs, client email, client networks	Per client

Not on the list because not in use: project-management, proposal, and scheduling apps, and every all-in-one freelancer suite. Tasks, projects, and deals live in the CRM, and client invoices go out through Wave.

How it works

The studio site is a Next.js app on Vercel. Every push to main deploys, and the build runs a content gate first, so thin pages, broken links, missing alt text, duplicate titles, and JSON-LD that does not parse fail the build.

The CRM lives at /admin on the same site, backed by a Supabase project. The schema is one Postgres namespace with the tables a studio needs: customers with a retainer amount and status, contacts, deals in five stages (Lead, Proposal, Negotiation, Won, Lost), projects, tasks with recurring definitions, invoices with line items, tags, file attachments stored on Vercel Blob, an activity timeline, and an audit log. Customers and deals both carry a lead source and the five UTM fields.

Two doors lead into that data besides the admin screens: a REST API at /api/crm/v1 and an MCP endpoint at /api/mcp, both authenticated with API keys stored as SHA-256 hashes that carry a scope (read-only, read-write, or admin) and an optional list of entity types the key may touch. The MCP server exposes 26 tools, from agenda and search through create_task and log_email. Every write through either door lands in the activity feed and the audit log with the key as the actor, so I can see exactly what an assistant did on a Tuesday afternoon. The MCP explainer goes through what that makes possible.

Email from the site goes through Resend. Payments go through Wave invoices, and the payment page, excluded from search, only explains how to pay. The blog you are reading is MDX compiled at build time with next-mdx-remote, with per-post Open Graph cards drawn by next/og and an RSS feed at /blog/feed.xml.

The one thing that runs elsewhere is The Outpost, a programmatic SEO publication WBX Creative built for Power Lodge Florida: Astro 7, MDX content collections, Tailwind 4, deployed to Cloudflare Pages by GitHub Actions, with a daily inventory sync. Different framework, same discipline, same gate.

Claude Code sits across all of it. The 2026 rebuild of the studio site, the gate, the blog engine, and the content operation behind this piece were built with it. The Claude Code opinion piece is the honest account of where that compounds and where it broke.

When it is worth it (and when it is not)

The self-built CRM is worth it for exactly one kind of person: a solo operator who writes code anyway and wants the data model, the API, and the AI access on their own terms. It is not worth it for a team, for anyone who does not want to maintain code, or for anyone who needs telephony, email sequences, and marketing automation out of the box. For those, the CRM playbook is the answer, and I implement those platforms for clients because I would not hand a client my own.

Vercel Pro is not optional. Vercel's fair-use guidelines, updated 2026-09-14, say "Hobby teams are restricted to non-commercial personal use only," and define commercial usage as any deployment "for the purpose of financial gain of anyone involved in any part of the production of the project, including a paid employee or consultant writing the code." "Advertising the sale of a product or service" is on the list of examples, and a studio site is advertising a service.

Supabase Pro is worth it the day the CRM has real data in it. The free tier pauses after a week of inactivity and keeps no backups. Pro adds seven-day backups and 8 GB of disk for $25 a month, as of September 2026.

Resend's free tier lasts longer than you would think. Transactional email from a one-person studio rarely approaches 100 a day. Move to Pro when the cap bites, not before.

Payments run through Wave invoices, not the site. There is no checkout on wbxcreative.com. The client clicks Review & Pay in the invoice email and pays by card, Apple Pay, or bank transfer, depending on the options enabled on that invoice, and can pay part of the balance.

Adobe has no substitute in this studio. Vehicle wraps, print, and dielines run on Illustrator and InDesign. The Pro plan is the largest list price in the table and the last one I would cut.

Claude Pro or Max is a usage question. Pro includes Claude Code at $20 a month. Max at $100 or $200 exists for people who run it all day.

Cloudflare Free for DNS is the easiest yes on the list. DNS, SSL, and DDoS protection at no charge, and Pages for a static Astro site with 500 builds a month free.

How I set it up

The order matters less than doing each step completely before the next.

1. Domain and DNS on Cloudflare. The registrar can stay where it is; nameservers point at Cloudflare.
2. Google Workspace on the domain. Business email first, because every other service wants a verified address.
3. GitHub private repo. One repo per site. Branch per phase, one kind of change per commit.
4. Vercel Pro, connected to the repo. Push to main deploys, gate included.
5. Supabase project. Apply the CRM schema through the management API. The admin app uses the service role; every other role stays locked out.
6. Resend with the domain verified. DKIM and SPF records in Cloudflare.
7. Wave for invoicing. No checkout on the site; the payment page is marked noindex and kept out of the sitemap.
8. GA4, Tag Manager, and Search Console. One container, four click events pushed to the dataLayer, two of them marked as key events, Search Console linked. This is the step still in progress on the studio site as of September 2026; the setup is its own guide.
9. Claude Code on the repo. With the rule from the January 2025 lesson: one type of change at a time, build after every change, commit working states.

The whole thing is deliberately boring. What the studio sells is on the services page, what it costs is on the pricing page, and who built it is on the bio page.