Everyone knows Vercel, Supabase, and Stripe. They deserve the attention. But some of the most useful tools in our Hidden Gems collection fly completely under the radar. Here are ten that we keep recommending and people keep being surprised by.

1. Plausible

Privacy-first analytics in a less-than-1KB script. No cookies, no consent banners, no complex dashboards. Just clean traffic data. If you don't need the full power of Google Analytics (and most people don't), Plausible gives you what matters without the bloat.

2. Resend

Email API built by the creator of React Email. Clean documentation, simple pricing, and an SDK that feels like it was designed by someone who actually sends transactional emails. The DX makes Sendgrid feel ancient.

3. Cal.com

Open source Calendly. Self-host it or use their cloud. Custom booking pages, team scheduling, integrations with everything. Free for individuals. The fact that more people still pay for Calendly when this exists is baffling.

4. Trigger.dev

Background jobs for TypeScript that actually work. Cron jobs, webhooks, long-running tasks, with retries and logging built in. Open source, deploy anywhere. If you've ever struggled with reliable background processing, this is the solution.

5. Hono

14KB web framework that runs everywhere: Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, Node. It's Express but modern, typed, and edge-ready. The new default for API routes when you don't need a full framework.

6. Upstash

Serverless Redis. Pay per request, scale to zero, no server management. Perfect for rate limiting, caching, session storage, and message queues. If you need Redis but don't want to manage infrastructure, this is it.

7. Turso

SQLite at the edge. Databases that sit close to your users for near-zero latency reads. Per-user databases become practical. If you're building anything where read speed matters, Turso is worth exploring.

8. Inngest

Event-driven functions with built-in retry logic, throttling, and scheduling. Think of it as a more elegant way to handle background work than cobbling together queues and cron jobs. The developer experience is excellent.

9. Better Stack

Uptime monitoring, incident management, and log management in one clean product. Beautiful status pages that your users actually want to look at. Replaces three separate monitoring tools with one.

10. Polar

Monetise open source properly. Sponsorships, subscriptions, and digital products for developers. If you maintain an open source project and want to earn from it without the awkwardness of GitHub Sponsors, Polar handles the commerce side elegantly.

Browse our full Hidden Gems collection for more underrated tools, or use the Stack CardNewStack Builder to discover tools you might not know about.