Best Tech Stack for a Landing Page Builder as a Solo Developer

Landing page builders are lucrative SaaS products. Unbounce, Leadpages, and Carrd have proven the market. Every startup, marketer, and freelancer needs landing pages, and most don't want to code them. Building a page builder as a solo developer is ambitious, but the scope can be managed if you pick the right tools and resist the urge to build a full website builder.

The core technical challenge: a visual drag-and-drop editor that outputs fast, clean HTML. Here's the stack that makes it feasible for one person.

Recommended Stack at a Glance

The Editor: GrapesJS or Craft.js

The visual editor is 80% of the product. Don't build one from scratch. Solo developers who attempt custom drag-and-drop page editors spend 6-12 months on the editor alone and never ship the product.

GrapesJS is an open-source web page builder framework with a mature feature set:

• Drag-and-drop block placement
• Style editor (CSS properties panel)
• Responsive design previews
• Layer manager (think Photoshop layers)
• Component system (reusable blocks)
• Undo/redo
• Code editor for advanced users
• HTML/CSS output

GrapesJS gives you a working visual editor that you can customize and style to match your brand. Your job is to create pre-built blocks (hero sections, pricing tables, testimonials, CTAs) and templates that users start from. This is where you add value over the raw editor.

Craft.js is the alternative if you want more control over the editor architecture. It's a React-based framework for building page editors. You define your own components (each React component becomes a draggable block) and Craft.js handles the drag-and-drop, selection, and serialization. More work than GrapesJS but more flexibility.

My recommendation: Start with GrapesJS unless you have a specific reason to need total control. It ships faster and users won't know or care which editor framework you used.

Frontend: Next.js

Your application has three main views:

1. Dashboard - List of pages, templates, account settings
2. Editor - The GrapesJS/Craft.js visual editor
3. Marketing site - Your own landing pages with pricing and signup

Next.js handles all three. Server-render your marketing site for SEO, client-render the editor for interactivity, and use the dashboard as a standard authenticated app.

For the template gallery, pre-build 10-20 landing page templates across common use cases: SaaS product launch, app download, newsletter signup, event registration, portfolio. Templates are a major purchase driver. Users buy page builders because of the templates, not the editor.

Backend: Next.js API Routes

Your backend handles:

• Page CRUD - Save, update, duplicate, delete pages
• Template management - Load and apply templates
• Publishing - Generate static HTML from the page data and deploy
• Custom domains - Configure custom domains for published pages
• Media uploads - Handle image uploads for the editor
• User management - Accounts, teams, billing

Store page data as JSON in PostgreSQL. Both GrapesJS and Craft.js serialize page state to JSON. When a user hits save, persist this JSON. When they reopen the editor, load the JSON and reconstruct the editor state.

When a user publishes, render the JSON to static HTML + CSS and deploy it.

Database: PostgreSQL with JSONB

Your main tables:

• users - Account and billing data
• pages - Title, slug, page_data (JSONB), published_html, status, custom_domain
• templates - Pre-built page templates as JSON
• media - Uploaded images and assets

JSONB is critical here. Page editor state is a deeply nested JSON structure representing the component tree, styles, and content. PostgreSQL's JSONB handles this efficiently and lets you query specific JSON paths if needed.

Prisma as the ORM handles the relational queries and migrations. For JSONB columns, Prisma works with Json type fields.

Host on Neon (serverless Postgres, free tier) or Supabase.

Page Hosting: Cloudflare Pages + Workers

When a user publishes their landing page, you need to serve it at a URL. This is the most interesting architectural challenge of a page builder.

Cloudflare Pages with Workers for routing:

1. User hits "Publish" in the editor
2. Your backend renders the page JSON to static HTML + CSS + inlined assets
3. Deploy the HTML to Cloudflare's edge via the Pages API
4. The page is live globally with sub-100ms load times

For custom domains, use Cloudflare for SaaS (Custom Hostnames). Users CNAME their domain to your Cloudflare setup, and Cloudflare handles SSL automatically.

The beauty of this approach: published landing pages cost you almost nothing to host. Cloudflare Pages serves static files for free with unlimited bandwidth. Your users get blazing-fast page loads, which directly impacts their conversion rates.

File Storage: Cloudflare R2

Users will upload images for their landing pages: hero images, logos, product screenshots, team photos. Store these in Cloudflare R2 with zero egress fees.

Implement direct browser-to-R2 uploads using signed URLs. The editor calls your API for a signed upload URL, uploads the image directly to R2, and uses the R2 URL in the page content. No file passes through your server.

Optimize images on upload using Sharp or a Cloudflare Worker that resizes and converts to WebP. Fast-loading images mean higher conversion rates for your users' landing pages.

Nice-to-Haves

• Stripe for subscription billing (monthly plans based on page count and custom domains)
• Resend for transactional emails (publish notifications, team invitations)
• Cloudflare Analytics for page performance metrics your users can see
• A/B testing - Serve different page variants and track conversion (premium feature)
• Form handling - Built-in form submission endpoint for landing page forms
• SEO meta editor - Let users set title, description, OG images per page

Monthly Cost Breakdown

Published landing pages cost essentially nothing to serve. Your main costs are the dashboard hosting and database, both of which are fixed and low.

Conclusion

The best stack for a solo developer building a landing page builder: Next.js for the app, GrapesJS for the visual editor, PostgreSQL JSONB for page data, Cloudflare Pages for serving published pages at the edge, and Cloudflare R2 for image storage.

Don't build the editor from scratch. Use GrapesJS, invest your time in beautiful templates, and make the publishing flow seamless. Users choose page builders based on template quality and ease of use, not technical sophistication of the editor. Ship 20 great templates and a one-click publish flow, and you'll have a product people pay for.