Building a Modern Booking Platform: Our Tech Stack and Why We Chose It

Why the Tech Stack Matters

When we set out to build a modern booking platform for the hospitality industry, choosing the right tech stack was critical. We needed something that could handle real-time availability, multi-language support across five locales, and scale with our clients' businesses.

After months of evaluation and building, here is what we settled on — and why each piece earned its place.

The Monorepo Foundation

Turborepo with Bun workspaces manages our monorepo — two apps (public website and admin dashboard) sharing eleven packages and three tooling configs. Turborepo's remote caching alone saved us hours on every CI run. Shared packages for the database layer, UI components, validators, and API types mean changes propagate instantly without version juggling.

Framework: TanStack Start + Nitro

TanStack Start gave us full-stack React 19 with server-side rendering powered by Nitro under the hood. Combined with the React Compiler, we get automatic memoization without manual useMemo and useCallback calls everywhere. Vite 8 handles the build with hot module replacement that feels instant.

Database Layer

Neon PostgreSQL (serverless HTTP driver) paired with Drizzle ORM provides type-safe database access with zero runtime overhead. The casing: "snake_case" option auto-converts our TypeScript camelCase conventions while the database stays conventional.

export const accommodations = pgTable("accommodations", (t) => ({
  id: t.serial("id").primaryKey(),
  type: t.text("type", { enum: ["weekend_house", "guest_room", "camping_house"] }).notNull(),
  basePrice: t.real("base_price").notNull(),
  maxGuests: t.integer("max_guests").notNull(),
}));

End-to-End Type Safety

tRPC v11 with SuperJSON and Sentry middleware connects our frontend to the backend with full type inference — no code generation needed. Combined with Zod v4 for schema validation on both client and server, we catch errors at compile time rather than in production.

The Supporting Cast

Better Auth with Google OAuth and an admin plugin for role-based access control
Tailwind CSS v4 with shadcn/ui (canary) for a polished, accessible UI
Paraglide JS v2 for compile-time i18n across five languages (EN, LV, RU, LT, DE)
Sentry for error tracking and performance monitoring (100% trace sample rate)
Amazon SES for transactional emails via React Email templates — all five locales
Vercel Blob for image storage with auto-conversion to AVIF
Vercel for deployment with SSR
Biome via Ultracite for Rust-powered linting and formatting

Info

Every piece of this stack was chosen because it solves a specific problem. There is no silver bullet — only deliberate trade-offs. The key is choosing tools that compose well together.

Results

This stack lets us ship features fast, catch bugs early, and scale confidently. For booking platforms where downtime means lost revenue, that reliability is everything.