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Reference

Tech Stack

The tools I use personally and for MAS. It is constantly evolving.

How to read this page

I would recommend selecting an AI LLM first, and then having a technical planning discussion with it on the rest of your stack.

Explain what you currently use, your level of comfort with technology and code, what you want to accomplish, and then evaluate alternatives in each category below.

The goal isn’t to copy this stack — it’s to make deliberate choices in each category for your own context.

AI LLM

The AI model that does the reasoning — the “brain” that reads, writes, and answers questions.

My selection

  • Anthropic Claude

Alternatives

  • OpenAI ChatGPT
  • Google Gemini
  • Microsoft Copilot

Comments

All four are mature enough for nonprofit use. The choice often comes down to which company you already trust with your data and whether they offer nonprofit pricing. Anthropic’s nonprofit program offers great pricing on a great model.
Website

The platform for building and managing your organization’s public website.

My selection

  • WordPress

Alternatives

  • Squarespace
  • Wix
  • Webflow
  • Lovable

Comments

WordPress is a legacy decision for MAS — powerful and extensible, but it needs ongoing care and feeding (updates, security patches, plugin maintenance). For my personal website I take a more modern approach: I use Claude to write the code, store it in GitHub, and host it on Vercel. Squarespace and Wix are the friendliest options if you don’t have a technical hand to lean on.
Office Productivity

Email, documents, spreadsheets, calendar, and file storage — the day-to-day office tools.

My selection

  • Microsoft 365

Alternatives

  • Google Workspace

Comments

We use Microsoft 365 for MAS; I use Google Workspace for myself. Both offer good packages for nonprofits — Microsoft 365 for Nonprofits and Google Workspace for Nonprofits. Either is fine; pick the one your team already knows.
CRM

Constituent Relationship Management — where you track donors, members, volunteers, and other supporters.

My selection

  • CiviCRM

Alternatives

  • Salesforce
  • Blackbaud
  • Bloomerang
  • HubSpot
  • Keela

Comments

CiviCRM is not the most user-friendly, but it’s free, open source, and has great nonprofit functionality. Salesforce offers ten free licenses to verified nonprofits; Bloomerang and Keela are easier to get started with but charge monthly. The right CRM depends less on features than on whether someone on your team will actually keep the data clean.
Code Repository

Where the code for custom websites and apps is stored, with a full history of every change.

My selection

  • GitHub

Alternatives

  • GitLab
  • Bitbucket

Comments

Free for most uses. If you’re not writing custom code, you may never touch this directly — but anyone building tools for you should be using one. Most AI coding tools integrate with GitHub by default.
Code Execution (Hosting)

Where your website or app actually runs so people on the internet can reach it.

My selection

  • OVH Cloud
  • Vercel

Alternatives

  • GoDaddy
  • DigitalOcean
  • Cloudflare
  • Netlify

Comments

You may need different hosting providers for different systems. Traditional WordPress and CiviCRM sites usually live on shared hosting like GoDaddy or OVH — cheap, but more maintenance falls on you. Modern AI-driven sites run on platforms like Vercel that handle deployment, scaling, and security automatically. New code I write goes to GitHub and is automatically deployed to Vercel.
Database

Where your data lives — donor records, contact lists, form submissions, anything you need to look up later.

My selection

  • Neon

Alternatives

  • Supabase
  • PlanetScale
  • Amazon RDS

Comments

Most nonprofits never pick a database directly — their CRM or website chooses one for them. WordPress ships with MySQL. Neon is a modern Postgres database that integrates well with Vercel and has a generous free tier. Worth knowing about if you’re building anything custom.
LLM Router

A go-between service that lets you test or switch between different AI models from one place.

My selection

  • OpenRouter

Alternatives

  • Vercel AI Gateway
  • Portkey
  • LiteLLM

Comments

Mostly useful when you’re building AI tools and want to compare models on price and performance before committing. Most nonprofits won’t need this directly — but the engineer building for you probably will.
Scraping Tools

Tools that automatically pull information from websites, social media, and search results.

My selection

  • Apify

Alternatives

  • Tavily
  • SerpAPI
  • Firecrawl

Comments

Basic web search will get you started, but often you need a tool like one of these to get at social media data or to crawl an entire website. Used mostly behind the scenes by AI agents that need to gather public information — the Allard Prize donor-intelligence system is one example.
One last note

Every choice here reflects a trade-off between cost, comfort, flexibility, and the time available to maintain it. None of these tools are the “right” answer in isolation.

Pick the LLM. Have the conversation. The rest follows.