There's a class of software that solves the simplest case and optimizes for the shortest time-to-launch (a different sort of TTL). When code is a liability, sometimes these are the best options. Think of this post as a continuation or list of examples for Solving the Simple Case. While these products aren't always the best for real stacks, they can be invaluable for a proof-of-concept or demo app. I imagine looking back at this list in a few years will be interesting.
Shortest-time-to-launch
Frontend web framework: NextJS/Vercel (Past: Ruby on Rails/Heroku)
Personal site: Webflow (Past: Squarespace)
Personal blog (non-technical): Substack (Past: WordPress)
Personal blog (static, self-hosted): GitHub Pages + Jekyll (Past: Nginx public www)
Scheduled Job: Render, Railway, Fly (AWS Lambda, Linux + cron)
Webhook: Render, Railway, Fly (AWS Lambda)
Host a model: HuggingFace
Basic analysis on a small dataset: Excel, jq, pandas in Python (Past: Excel)
SQL Database: SQLite (Past: PostgreSQL)
Stack: JAMStack (Past: MEAN, LAMP)
Backend as a Service: Supabase (past: Firebase)
Authentication: Auth0, Cognito (past: social sign in, manual)
What are some other shortest-time-to-launch products and categories?