Stack

Planetscale went from $1,000 to $815/mo after a smaller disk and a PrivateLink connection. This excludes the database for Curated.

Replaced Heroku with AWS ($1,700/mo).

Updated costs to match our latest bills: Postmark ($1,670), Mailgun ($485), Plain ($615), Anthropic ($350), Cloudflare ($200), Sentry ($200), Linear ($195), Google Suite ($175), DigitalOcean ($150), Tuple ($150), Slack ($75), incident.io ($70), Pulumi ($65), Vercel ($60), 1Password ($25), and ClickHouse ($11).

Moved local development from mprocs to dekit, its successor from the same author.

Stopped using Seline; website analytics now run on Cortado, our own in-house tool.

Stopped using Octolens; social media mention monitoring now runs off our own crawlers.

Stopped using Kolo for Django request tracing.

Removed SparkPost, which rolled into Postmark. Replaced Cursor and OpenAI with Anthropic.

Seline went from $34 to $59/mo.

Dropped HAProxy, Localias, and Overmind; local development now runs on mprocs and Portless, and edge routing runs on our own Cloudflare Worker. Also ended our paid Spamhaus subscription — we still use the free public blocklists.

Dropped our team CleanShot subscription; screenshot hosting now runs off our own internal-files tooling.

Removed Proximo, which we no longer used.

Stopped using Cleantalk for signup spam detection.

Planetscale went from $1,400 to $1,000/mo.

Removed UptimeRobot — TLS monitoring now run off our in-house checker framework.

Stopped using StopForumSpam for spam detection.

Added ClickHouse ($5/mo) for archival storage.

Added UptimeRobot (Solo plan) for uptime monitoring.

Sentry went from $100 to $250/mo.

Pruned tools we no longer use: GitHub Actions, Hetzner, Mono Lisa, Things, and Timing.

Removed Goto — still a great tool, but we've replaced it with individual usage. Also dropped Sender Score, which never gave us useful feedback.

Removed Redis Enterprise Cloud; caching and rate limiting now run off Postgres.

Moved Pulumi Cloud back to a paid plan ($40/mo).

Stopped using Blacksmith for CI; moved all GitHub Actions workflows to self-hosted runners.

Removed Sendgrid ($40/mo).

Added Goto for go links (free).

Added Proximo ($5/mo) for outbound HTTP proxying.

Mailgun went from $20 to $600/mo.

Cut Vercel from $240 to $40/mo.

Gusto dropped from $200 to $130/mo. Tuple, Cleantalk, and Seline went up to $120, $70, and $34/mo.

Cut Heroku from $2,100 to $1,200/mo, Blacksmith from $275 to $125/mo, Sentry from $185 to $100/mo, and Redis Enterprise Cloud from $250 to $25/mo.

Stopped using Obsidian; internal docs now run on our own viewer app.

Removed Anymail in favor of bespoke SMTP backends. We've moved sufficiently far away from it that it no longer makes sense, but we'd still recommend it.

Added disposable-email-domains to the stack; donating $10/mo.

Added Timing ($14/mo) for time tracking.

Churned from S3 in favor of Cloudflare R2.

Churned from Better Stack in favor of using Sentry's logging + uptime monitoring.

Downgraded Pulumi Cloud from paid to free tier.

Churned from Better Stack to incident.io for incident management.

Stopped using Tailscale. Great service, we just didn't need it.

Stopped using HEX for data notebooks.

Added Obsidian for internal documentation.

Stopped using DNSimple for DNS management.

Stopped using ImprovMX for email forwarding.

Migrated from Amazon RDS to Planetscale. Removed Iframely and Granola.

Replaced Vista Social with Buffer for social media management.

Replaced Vercel Analytics with Seline for website analytics.

Added StopForumSpam for spam detection (free!).

Published our year-end stack roundup.

Removed Vista Social, Quickbooks, and Valtown from the stack.

Stopped using Mimestream for email.

Stopped using Groove for customer support.

Added Pulumi for infrastructure as code.

Added Have I Been Pwned for breach detection (removed 2026-04).

Added Bunny (DNS), CleanShot (screenshots), Granola (notetaking), and Sendgrid (SMTP) over the summer.

Started using Vista Social to manage social media accounts and Tailscale to manage the server storing internal docs. Stopped using Trotto (in favor of Tailscale's own OSS version).

Replaced Depot with Blacksmith (faster, cheaper)

So much stuff we had to write a whole blog post about it!

Started using Depot to speed up GitHub Actions

Started using Fivetran and Metabase to analyze data and construct a (janky, but useful!) WBR

Started using Mercury as a banking solution

Added Pika, Cloudflare, and a handful of other tools; churned from Texts, Sketch, Bear, and Imgix.

Added Audiogest to the stack. It's a nice little tool!

Had to bump up my Imgix plan from $75 to $200/mo because of traffic. Time to find something cheaper!

Added val.town

Add PopSQL (which technically I've been using for a while but forgot about)

Migrated off of Heroku Redis and onto Redis Enterprise Cloud, which means saving $70/mo for five minutes of switching environment variables.

Onboarded to Calibre.

Purchased a reserved instance for my big ol' RDS database, saving $110/mo.

Initial launch of this page.