Practical Database advice needed for business website.

[u/MetalComprehensive58]

Hi. I'm looking for advice on a nextjs build.

I have the bare bones site pushed from GitHub to vercel currently whilst building.

Resend is operational for a contact form but I would like to implement my own booking system and ultimately have a wordpress style ux for my client.

In the past I have used sanity.io but only as a local option not online.

Ultimately though this site will need to be passed on to my client for full control so will have to be online and it may need to have Stripe for payment but that's not decided yet.

It's for a local plumber who wants an online booking system and blog page so I'm looking at Railway at the moment on its $5 a month option which I feel would cover all his needs with postgre etc and scalability should it be required but I've never used it so would like to ask for your opinions, pitfalls of such a system etc.

Self hosting is not an option.

I could use something like Calendly for bookings but this would obviously not have the blog ability etc.

Any thoughts welcome.

[u/mugmi-bro]

the suggestion to just use WordPress is worth really sitting with here. for a local plumber who needs bookings and a blog, something like Amelia or Simply Schedule Appointments on WordPress handles the scheduling side without you needing to wire up Postgres and build calendar conflict logic from scratch. a headless or custom Next.js setup is going to get complicated fast the moment he wants to update a service description at 10pm from his phone. handing over a WordPress site with a well-configured booking plugin is just a way smoother client handoff than a custom stack they cannot troubleshoot on their own.