I Burned Down My Infra and Rebuilt It in a Day
Too many platforms, too much chaos — here’s how I consolidated everything and stopped paying for confusion.
Ok, me again - Real John :D. I got inspired today and decided to fix a bunch of things. My older dog is not doing well, so I decided to not go anywhere today and as he sleeps, I play with code. No pictures or promotion this time, if you get this one, cool. This one is more for me to reference when I think I found a new tool and I’ll read this and say STOP, you already have tools that work great. So enjoy the bonus newsletter this week, it is mainly for me but hope you enjoy it too. Six of hearts, if you know you know. - Here you go.
And future me - Don’t chase a fun new tool, play with it and see if it solves a real problem, not just a hype-tool that re-invents a wheel you already have.
Today I did something I should have done six months ago. I shut down a product, migrated five apps, collapsed four databases into two, and finally got my entire portfolio living in one place. The whole thing took about 6 hours, cost me almost nothing, and I had Claude riding shotgun the entire way.
Let me tell you what I killed, what I moved, and why I stopped tolerating the sprawl.
The Graveyard and the Migration List
First, the casualty: PTTrak.com — my personal trainer client tracking app — is dead. It wasn’t working. I killed it. Sometimes the right move is just to stop.
Then the migrations. I had apps scattered across three platforms:
Replit: TheThirdSignal.org, StartupsAndCode.com, and CashCritters.com
Abacus.ai: StatusSage (site monitoring tool)
Five apps. Three platforms. Zero good reason for any of it.
Replit is great for prototyping — I’ve built a lot of fast MVPs there. But it’s not where production apps should live long-term. Abacus.ai is genuinely impressive for AI-native tooling, but I was using it as a host, not for its strengths. That’s just waste.
The Database Mess Was Worse
Here’s where it got embarrassing. I was running:
Firebase (real-time, auth)
NeonDB (Postgres)
Base44
Supabase (Postgres)
Four database platforms. For a solo builder. That’s not a stack — that’s a support ticket waiting to happen.
Supabase is genuinely excellent. If you haven’t used it, you should. But I already had Neon, and Neon is a serverless Postgres installation that fits my workflow better for most use cases. Firebase stays because real-time and auth are where it actually shines. Everything else got consolidated.
Two databases. Done.
Why Vercel
I didn’t pick Vercel because it’s the hottest thing on Twitter. I picked it because I already use it every day at work, which means I’m not context-switching into an unfamiliar dashboard at 11pm trying to debug a deploy.
The reasons, plainly:
I know it cold. Daily usage at Fora means zero learning curve on nights and weekends.
GitHub integration is seamless. Push to main, it deploys. That’s the whole story.
The dashboard is clean. Analytics are built in. I can see what’s actually happening without installing anything extra.
It handles my stack. React frontends, serverless functions, environment variables — it just works.
Familiarity is underrated. The best tool is the one you’ll actually use correctly under pressure.
Claude Did the Heavy Lifting
I’m not going to pretend I did all of this from memory. Claude handled the migration scripts, the config rewrites, the environment variable restructuring, and talked me through every platform-specific gotcha along the way. I also gave Codex a spin on a couple of pieces — honestly not bad — but Claude’s still my go-to. Better context, better judgment on the messy edge cases.
This is what AI-assisted development actually looks like in practice. Not magic. Not replacing engineering. Just a really fast pair programmer who doesn’t complain about scope creep.
The Takeaway
Sprawl is a silent killer for solo builders. Every extra platform is another login, another billing cycle, another mental model to maintain. Consolidation isn’t glamorous — but a weekend of cleanup buys you months of clarity.
Shut down what isn’t working. Move what matters. Pick boring, reliable tools you already understand.
Now go build something amazing.
John Mann is the Director of Engineering at Fora Travel and writes Startups and Code — a newsletter about AI, startups, and building real things. Next issue: TBD.