The Software Stack Behind My Six-Figure USD Online Business
A review of all tech, legal & financial tools I use
I spent 11 months in Thailand working in travel tech that pushed me to build a completely online business, which I can use to travel & work simultaneously.
The business has:
No office.
No in-person meeting
No giant startup burn rate.
No VC pressure.
I wanted a business that felt lightweight — something I could run from a laptop anywhere in the world.
So I started small.
The initial investment was only around $2,000 — mostly just to register the Singapore company through Osome and get the structure operational.
That was it.
No funding round.
No expensive setup.
No giant team.
Fast forward to today, the business is doing six figures+ in ARR, runs almost entirely remotely, and operates surprisingly lean.
Most days I’m working out of cafés somewhere in Southeast Asia, while systems, contractors, automations, and AI handle most of the operational load.
This is the stack behind it.
Company Setup & Finance
Osome — Singapore Compliance & Accounting
Rating: 3/5
I chose Osome because Singapore is one of the best places globally to run an internet business — clean regulations, strong banking infrastructure, founder-friendly policies, and international credibility.
Osome made incorporation extremely easy.
The problem is reliability.
Their accounting works until it doesn’t. Response times can vary wildly, bookkeeping occasionally feels disconnected, and I learned quickly that you still need to monitor everything yourself rather than assuming it’s all handled.
Good enough for lean operators.
Not something I’d blindly trust at larger scale.
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Banking Stack
Wise
Rating: 4/5
Wise is probably the best fintech product I use.
Excellent UX.
Great forex rates.
Fast international transfers.
Very smooth overall experience.
For an online business operating across countries, currencies, and contractors, it removes an enormous amount of friction.
The only downside is that it still doesn’t fully feel like a traditional bank.
When issues happen, you remember quickly why legacy banking institutions still dominate globally.
Still one of the strongest products in my stack overall.
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Aspire
Rating: 3.5/5
Aspire mainly exists in my stack for one reason:
USD accounts for a Singapore company.
That alone makes it valuable.
But the platform itself feels dated.
The UI is clunky.
Reliability can be inconsistent.
Some product flows feel unfinished.
It works — but it’s hard to describe it as polished.
Hiring & Contractor Management
I intentionally built the business contractor-first.
No office politics.
No unnecessary payroll complexity.
No hiring people just to imitate a “startup culture.”
The internet already gives access to incredible global talent.
Deel
Rating: 3/5
Deel is polished and popular, but over time I noticed hidden fees and pricing complexity stacking up.
The product itself is good.
The economics became annoying.
Remote
Rating: 4/5
Remote became my preferred option.
Cleaner pricing.
More transparent billing.
Less enterprise-sales friction.
For international contractors, it’s simply easier to work with.
AI Stack
This business realistically would not exist in its current form without AI.
AI compresses execution time massively. Tasks that previously needed teams can now often be handled by one person with good systems.
Current split:
Anthropic — 60%
OpenAI — 20%
DeepSeek — 10%
Misc. —10%
Anthropic
Anthropic has been the backbone of most serious reasoning and coding workflows for me.
Claude still feels like the best “thinking partner” for architecture, debugging, writing, and long-context problem solving.
That said, I’m intentionally reducing dependence on Anthropic over time.
Relying too heavily on a single model provider feels risky long-term as pricing, APIs, and ecosystems evolve.
OpenAI
OpenAI remains the strongest overall ecosystem.
Best integrations.
Best multimodal capabilities.
Fastest product velocity.
Even if Claude often feels better for deep work, OpenAI still feels like the most complete platform overall.
DeepSeek
DeepSeek is the wildcard.
Extremely cost-effective.
Shockingly capable for certain coding and reasoning tasks.
Still early, but impossible to ignore.
Coding Stack
Cursor
Rating: 4/5
Cursor has the best UX among AI coding editors right now.
Fast iteration.
Excellent autocomplete flow.
Feels genuinely AI-native.
It’s one of the few tools that actually increases development speed noticeably.
Claude Code
Rating: 4.5/5
Claude Code wins on raw model quality and coding intelligence.
The outputs are often smarter and more reliable than Cursor’s default experience.
But Cursor still wins on workflow and usability.
My ideal setup is honestly a combination of both.
Infrastructure & Hosting
Google Cloud Run
Rating: 3.5/5
Google Cloud Run is technically excellent.
Scales beautifully.
Minimal operational overhead.
Strong infrastructure.
But for smaller projects, pricing escalates quickly.
A lot of cloud infrastructure today feels optimized for venture-backed startups rather than lean internet businesses.
DigitalOcean
Rating: 4/5
DigitalOcean is what I recommend to most people starting online businesses.
Simple.
Predictable pricing.
Good enough for nearly everything.
You lose some sophistication compared to hyperscalers, but you gain simplicity and sanity.
That tradeoff is worth it.
Thank you for reading!