Every choice has a reason.
Every reason is your advantage.

PHP powers roughly 77% of all websites — WordPress, Wikipedia, Etsy, Slack's backend, Mailchimp. And PHP 8 is fast and modern — JIT-compiled, with optional strict typing when you want it. Each request runs in a clean, isolated process — no shared state to leak, stateless by design, which makes it stable by design. The talent pool is huge and affordable, so hiring is a solved problem.

Tiger runs a PHP 8 evolution of Zend Framework 1's architecture: enterprise-grade structure with modern language features. The payoff for AI-assisted development is huge — controllers live in the controllers directory, models in models, views in views, and every module follows the same shape. When your AI reads a Tiger app it doesn't guess; it reads a predictable pattern and works with confidence. The wiring is explicit — what you see is what runs — so nothing is hidden behind runtime magic the AI has to infer.

Twenty microservices mean twenty deployments, network boundaries to debug, and orchestration overhead that needs a full-time DevOps engineer — distributed-systems complexity at startup scale. A well-structured monolith is faster to build, easier to debug, simpler to deploy, and cheaper to run. Tiger is one application, one process, one deployment, ~10ms responses — no service mesh, no API gateway, no container choreography.

Drop a JavaScript file in, reference it in your view, and it works — React, Vue, Alpine, vanilla, or nothing. No Webpack, no Vite, no Babel, no bundler, no node_modules folder with tens of thousands of transitive packages you've never audited. That's also a security decision: deep npm dependency trees are a real supply-chain attack surface, and the best defense against a supply-chain attack is not having a supply chain. The best part is no part.

Tiger ships on MariaDB: the open-source continuation of MySQL, maintained by its original creators after Oracle acquired MySQL — fully MySQL-compatible, ubiquitous, and free of vendor lock-in. A great, boring default that runs everywhere. But the data layer is database-agnostic: point it at any engine with a PDO driver — PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server — and the query builder and models work the same. Your database stays invisible, and yours.

Apache has served the web since 1995, Nginx since 2004; between them they handle most of the traffic on earth, and every host supports them. Tiger doesn't need an edge network, serverless functions with cold-start penalties, or a vendor routing layer — just a web server that hands a request to PHP. No cold starts, no invocation fees. The request arrives, PHP handles it, the response ships.

Composer dependency trees are flat and explicit: you declare what you need, versions resolve deterministically, you commit the lock file, and every install is identical. Tiger's composer.json is a short list of intentional packages from established vendors — AWS SDK, Stripe SDK, PHPMailer — each a deliberate choice with a security team behind it. You can actually read the list and know what's there and why.

A browser requests a Tiger page and gets complete, rendered HTML — no blank screen while a client framework boots, no "loading…" spinner, no hydration step. That means fast by default (HTML paints before any framework could bootstrap), SEO-ready by default (search engines see full pages), accessible by default (screen readers see content immediately), and resilient by default (if JavaScript fails, the page still works).

On login, Tiger writes a session record and hands the browser an opaque token — a UUID that means nothing on its own. Every request looks up the session and the ACL evaluates permissions in real time. The token carries identity only, never roles or claims, so there's nothing to forge and permissions can be changed or revoked instantly — no waiting for a token to expire. Less is more: the token carries identity, the server carries everything else.

Model, View, Controller for the web layer — plus a service layer (SOA) where the business logic lives. Each has one job and one predictable location: data in the model, presentation in the view, thin request-handling in the controller, business logic in the service. Every layer can be tested, changed, or replaced independently. For AI-assisted development that's the whole game: when your AI needs to change how data is stored it goes to the model; how a page looks, the view; how the business logic behaves, the service. It never has to wonder where something lives. Predictability is productivity.

Use it however you want — modify it, build a commercial product on it, sell that product, keep all the money. The only asks: keep the license notice, don't use the project name to endorse your product, and don't blame us if something breaks. Unlike copyleft licenses (GPL/AGPL), where derivative or even networked use can force your own code open, BSD-3 is the license enterprise legal teams approve without a fight — protective enough to trust, permissive enough to be practical.