Tech stack choices for Nigerian startups in 2026

The difference between a Nigerian startup that scales and one that collapses under its own infrastructure costs often comes down to one decision made in week two of development. You pick Django and PostgreSQL because that's what you know, or you grab Next.js and Vercel because a founder in San Francisco swears by it-and then your AWS bill arrives and you realise you've been running on the wrong fuel for your market.

This isn't abstract. In our experience at LaunchPad, we've seen fintech teams in Yaba rebuild their entire backend because they chose a hosting provider that didn't handle Nigerian payment gateway latency well. We've watched e-commerce founders in Kano lose weeks to database migration because they didn't plan for growth from day one. And we've seen teams ship faster and cheaper by making deliberate, Africa-first choices from the start.

By the end of this article, you'll know exactly which tech stack makes sense for your stage, your market, and your cash runway. Not what's trendy. What works here, now.

The hard constraints of building in Nigeria

Before you pick a single tool, you need to understand what "building in Nigeria" actually means in 2026. It's not the same as building in London or San Francisco, and pretending it is will cost you.

First: latency matters more than you think. Your users aren't just in Lagos. A significant chunk are in Kano, Port Harcourt, Benin City-places where internet is often on 4G LTE, sometimes 3G, and connection drops are normal. If your API response takes 800ms because your server is in Frankfurt and you're not caching aggressively, users will churn. Payment gateways like Paystack and Flutterwave have regional infrastructure, but your app code needs to be close to them and to your users.

Second: bandwidth costs are real. If you're on a per-GB egress model with AWS or Google Cloud, you will bleed money. A single poorly optimised image served to 10,000 users in Nigeria can cost you ₦50,000 in a week. This isn't theoretical-it's why so many Nigerian startups end up on Hetzner or DigitalOcean instead of the big three.

Third: payment infrastructure is your critical path. You're not just choosing a database-you're choosing a stack that integrates cleanly with Paystack, Flutterwave, Moniepoint, or OPay. If your backend makes it hard to retry failed transactions or verify webhook signatures, you'll lose revenue and customer trust.

Fourth: you probably can't afford to hire a DevOps engineer yet. Your tech stack needs to be boring, well-documented, and forgiving. Kubernetes is a distraction. Managed databases are not.

The frontend layer: Next.js or something else

Next.js has become the default for African startups, and for good reason. It's not because it's trendy-it's because it solves real problems for teams like yours.

A Next.js app gives you server-side rendering out of the box, which means your pages load faster on slow connections. It gives you API routes, so you don't need a separate backend service for simple operations. It gives you image optimisation built in, which matters when your users are on metered data. And it works well with edge deployment, which we'll come back to.

The alternative-a separate React frontend and a Node.js backend, or a Vue frontend with a Python backend-isn't wrong, but it adds complexity. You now have two codebases to deploy, two error logs to check, two places for things to break. For a team of 2-4 engineers shipping fast, that's overhead you don't need.

If you're building something that doesn't need a web UI at all-say, a mobile-first app or an API service-then Next.js isn't your answer. But if you're building anything consumer-facing, anything that needs a dashboard, anything that needs to work on a 2G connection in a rural area, Next.js gets you there faster.

One caveat: don't use Next.js as an excuse to build a monolith. Keep your API logic separate from your page rendering logic. Use Next.js API routes for thin adapters to your real backend services, not for your entire business logic. This matters more as you scale.

The backend: Node.js, Python, or Go

This is where founders get religious, and it's usually not productive.

Node.js is the obvious choice if you're already writing Next.js. You're using the same language. Your team already knows it. Deployment is straightforward. The ecosystem is mature. Hapi, Express, Fastify-pick one and move on. The downside: Node.js uses more memory than alternatives, which matters if you're running on a small VPS. And it's not the fastest language for CPU-heavy work.

Python is excellent if you're doing anything with data, machine learning, or complex business logic. Django and FastAPI are both solid frameworks. The ecosystem is better than Node's in many domains. The downside: Python is slower than Go, and it uses more memory than you'd expect. For a simple CRUD API, you're paying a tax for capabilities you don't need.

Go is the dark horse. It's fast, it uses minimal memory, and compiled binaries are easy to deploy. If you're building something that needs to handle millions of requests efficiently-say, a payment router or an SMS aggregator-Go is worth learning. The downside: the ecosystem is smaller, and hiring Go engineers in Nigeria is harder than hiring Python or Node engineers.

For most Nigerian startups in 2026, the honest answer is: pick the language your team knows best, and move on. The difference between Node and Python in performance is dwarfed by the difference between a team that ships fast and a team that ships slow. If you're spending three weeks debating Go vs Node, you've already lost.

That said, if you're starting from scratch and you're building a fintech product or a payment infrastructure tool, Go is worth considering. The operational simplicity pays for itself.

The database: Postgres is table stakes

Postgres is the right choice for almost every Nigerian startup. Not because it's trendy-it's not, it's been around since 1997-but because it's reliable, it's powerful, and it's cheap to run.

MongoDB and other NoSQL databases have their place, but that place is not your MVP. They're more expensive to operate, they're harder to reason about when you're debugging data issues at 2am, and they don't integrate as cleanly with payment systems. Stick with Postgres.

The real question is where to run it. You have three options:

Option 1: Managed Postgres (Supabase, Neon, Railway). This is the right choice for 90% of startups. You don't manage backups, you don't manage upgrades, and you don't wake up at 3am because your disk is full. Supabase and Neon both have good free tiers. Neon is slightly cheaper at scale. Railway is more expensive but has better support for Nigerian users. Read Supabase vs Neon vs self-hosted Postgres for African startups for a detailed breakdown.

Option 2: Self-hosted Postgres on a VPS. This is cheaper upfront-you can run a decent Postgres instance on a DigitalOcean or Hetzner VPS for ₦15,000-30,000 a month. But it's more expensive in terms of your time. You're responsible for backups, upgrades, security patches, and monitoring. For a solo founder or a team of 2-3, this is a distraction. Use a managed service.

Option 3: Amazon RDS or Google Cloud SQL. These are good, but they're expensive for Nigerian startups. Egress costs alone will kill you. Only use them if you're already deep in the AWS or GCP ecosystem for other reasons.

For most teams, the answer is Supabase or Neon. Both are solid. Both have free tiers that will get you through your first 50,000 users. Neon is slightly more performant and slightly cheaper. Supabase has better documentation and a larger community. Pick one and move.

Hosting and deployment: where your app actually lives

This is where your bandwidth costs either kill you or don't.

Vercel is the obvious choice if you're using Next.js. Deployment is one click. Scaling is automatic. The edge network is good. The problem: Vercel's free tier is limited, and their paid tier gets expensive fast if you're serving a lot of traffic from Nigeria. They charge for bandwidth, and bandwidth is your enemy.

Railway is increasingly popular with African founders. They have a flat-rate pricing model that doesn't penalise you for bandwidth. Deployment is straightforward. The free tier is generous. The downside: the platform is younger, the community is smaller, and support can be slower.

Netlify is similar to Vercel. Good for static sites and simple Next.js apps. Expensive for high-traffic applications.

For anything production-grade, consider Render or Fly.io. Both are designed for startups. Both have simple pricing. Both allow you to deploy to regions close to your users. Fly.io in particular has good support for deploying to multiple regions, which matters if you're serving users across West Africa.

If you want to save money and you're willing to manage your own infrastructure, a VPS on Hetzner or DigitalOcean is still a solid choice. You get full control, you pay a flat monthly fee regardless of bandwidth, and you can scale vertically (bigger server) before you need to scale horizontally (multiple servers). For a startup doing ₦1-5M in monthly revenue, a single good VPS is enough. Read Where to host your African startup: VPS vs serverless vs PaaS for a detailed comparison.

Payment integration: the glue that holds it together

Your tech stack isn't complete until you've thought about how you're integrating with Paystack, Flutterwave, Moniepoint, or OPay.

Paystack and Flutterwave both have excellent SDKs for Node.js and Python. Their webhooks are reliable. Their documentation is clear. If you're using either, your backend work is straightforward.

The key: don't try to be clever. Use their SDKs. Follow their examples. Implement webhook verification exactly as they specify. More startups lose money to webhook bugs than to any other integration issue. A webhook comes in, you don't verify it properly, you credit a user who didn't actually pay, and now you're out cash.

Also: plan for failures. Payment gateways go down. Networks drop. Your server crashes in the middle of processing a transaction. You need idempotency keys, you need retry logic, and you need to store enough state that you can recover if something goes wrong. This isn't optional-it's the difference between a payment system that works and one that loses money.

Caching, queues, and the stuff you'll add later

For your MVP, you don't need Redis. You don't need message queues. You don't need a search engine. You need a database, an API, and a frontend. Ship that first.

But know that you'll add these things eventually. When you do:

• Redis: Use it for session storage, caching, and rate limiting. Upstash has a good managed Redis service for African startups. It's cheaper than AWS ElastiCache.
• Message queues: Bull (for Node.js) or Celery (for Python) are both solid. For managed services, consider AWS SQS or Google Cloud Tasks. Again, watch egress costs.
• Search: Meilisearch is open-source and lightweight. Algolia is excellent but expensive for high-volume searches.

Don't add these to your initial stack. Add them when you have a specific problem they solve.

Monitoring, logging, and knowing what's broken

You need to know when your app breaks. Ideally before your users tell you.

For error tracking, use Sentry. It's free up to a point, and it's worth paying for. You'll catch bugs you didn't know existed.

For logs, start with whatever your hosting provider gives you. Vercel has logs. Railway has logs. A VPS has syslog. Once you outgrow that, Datadog is the standard, but it's expensive. Cheaper alternatives include LogRocket (for frontend errors) and Axiom (for general logging).

For uptime monitoring, use Uptime Robot or similar. It's cheap and it works.

Don't over-engineer this. A startup that has Datadog but no error tracking is worse off than a startup with Sentry and no Datadog. Start simple.

Putting it together: a concrete example

Let's say you're building a B2B SaaS product for logistics companies in Lagos. Here's what I'd recommend:

• Frontend: Next.js on Vercel (or Railway if bandwidth is a concern)
• Backend: Node.js with Express or Fastify
• Database: Postgres on Neon (managed, cheap, reliable)
• Payment: Paystack API integration with proper webhook handling
• Monitoring: Sentry for errors, Uptime Robot for uptime
• Caching: None initially. Add Redis when you need it.
• Deployment: GitHub to Vercel or Railway, one click.

This stack will cost you roughly ₦30,000-50,000 a month at scale. It will handle 100,000 requests a day without breaking a sweat. It will let a team of 2 engineers ship fast and iterate based on user feedback.

Is it optimal? No. But it's simple, it's well-understood, and it works. That's worth more than optimal.

If you're building a high-frequency trading system or a real-time collaborative tool, you might need different choices. But for most Nigerian startups, this stack is the right answer.

Common mistakes to avoid

1. Choosing a stack because it's trendy, not because it solves your problem. WebAssembly is cool. You don't need it.

2. Over-engineering for scale you don't have. You don't need Kubernetes. You don't need a microservices architecture. You need a simple, boring stack that ships fast.

3. Ignoring bandwidth costs. This kills more African startups than any other infrastructure decision. Know your egress costs.

4. Not planning for payment integration from day one. If your stack makes it hard to integrate with Paystack, you've picked wrong.

5. Skipping error tracking and monitoring. You will regret this. Sentry costs less than an hour of your time debugging a production bug.

6. Using a database that isn't Postgres unless you have a specific reason. You probably don't have a specific reason.

What to do next

If you're starting a new project today:

1. Pick Next.js + Node.js + Postgres. Don't overthink it. This is the right default for 95% of Nigerian startups.

2. Choose a hosting provider based on your bandwidth needs and budget. If you're unsure, start with Vercel or Railway. Both are excellent.

3. Read Ship your MVP in 2 weeks: a Nigerian founder's playbook to understand how to move fast with this stack.

If you're already running a startup and wondering if you should migrate:

1. Don't migrate unless you have a specific problem. Rewriting infrastructure is expensive and risky.

2. If you do migrate, do it incrementally. Move one service at a time. Keep the old system running until the new one is proven.

3. Focus on the parts that are actually costing you money. Usually it's bandwidth or database queries, not the framework you chose.

FAQ

Q: Should I use TypeScript for my Nigerian startup? A: Yes, if your team is comfortable with it. It catches bugs that would otherwise cost you time in production. But don't use it as an excuse to slow down-set up a good build pipeline and move on.

Q: Is Django + React a viable stack for Nigerian startups? A: Yes, if your team knows Django well. It's not as efficient as Next.js, but it's solid. Just make sure your hosting plan accounts for the extra memory Django uses.

Q: When should I move from a managed database to self-hosted? A: When your database costs exceed ₦100,000 a month and you have a DevOps engineer on staff. Before that, use managed services.

Q: Can I build a fintech product with this stack? A: Yes. The stack itself doesn't determine security-careful engineering does. Use proper encryption, validate all inputs, implement webhook verification correctly, and you're fine.

Q: What if I want to use a different programming language? A: Go for it, but understand the trade-offs. Ruby, Elixir, and Rust all have strong communities. They're all more niche in Nigeria, which means harder hiring. Pick based on your team's skills, not on what's trendy.