about

One developer. Own money. Own server.

SoloStack is written by a solo developer who builds and runs his own products from a cheap VPS. Every tool reviewed here gets tested in that context — a one-person team, a real budget, no procurement department to impress.

What actually runs here

This isn't a site about hypothetical stacks. A single small server hosts these pages, an app backend serving real users, a public API, and an automated trading program that places orders with my own money. It all runs unattended, and it has to still be running tomorrow.

That constraint is the entire editorial position. A tool that needs babysitting, or that bills unpredictably, or that falls over when nobody's watching, is a bad tool for a solo developer regardless of how well it demos. The full setup is documented in how I run everything from a $5 VPS.

How tools get on the list

Four bars, and most popular tools fail the first: priced for one person rather than a five-seat team, replaces work I'm already doing by hand, has a free tier or trial big enough to reach a verdict on, and lets me leave with my data. The applied version of that is the best AI apps for solo developers.

The reviews are opinionated on purpose. When a tool isn't worth the money, the page says so, including for products with affiliate programs — and several recommendations here pay nothing at all. Hetzner is recommended on two pages and has no affiliate program; Claude Code tops the AI list and pays nothing either. That's deliberate: a list where every entry pays is not a list, it's an advert.

The failures get published too

Anyone can write up what worked. The more useful half is what didn't, so it's here as well — including the bugs in my trading bot that nearly cost me real money, and an honest verdict that the strategy's edge turned out to be marginal. If a page here ever reads like everything went smoothly, it's incomplete.

How the site makes money

Some links are affiliate links: sign up through one and the vendor pays a commission, at no extra cost to you. Not every program has approved this site yet, so a number of links currently earn nothing at all — they're plain links to the vendor, and they're marked differently in the page source than the paid ones. Every page carries a disclosure, and the full disclosure spells out the rest.

Commissions never decide a verdict. The fastest way to make this site worthless would be to recommend the best-paying tool instead of the right one.

Questions or corrections: the site improves when readers point out what's changed.

Some links on this page are affiliate links — if you sign up through them, SoloStack earns a commission at no extra cost to you. I only list tools I'd run on my own server. Full disclosure.