BareStack

We build the systems you don't want to.

14/08/2026

I pulled project-management prices for the pricing index last week.

Jira is $7.91 a user. Basecamp is $15 a user. ClickUp is $7 a user. Every one of them has a free tier that handles small teams.

Most small businesses I know are paying for five seats and using three. The missing two are profit, not software cost.

If your team is paying for tools with free alternatives, I am happy to take a look at what else is eating your budget.

12/08/2026

The simplest tool wins.

We built BareStack because we kept building versions we did not need. A dashboard nobody opened. A workflow builder nobody configured. An invoice module for a deal that never closed.

None of it got used. The things people actually reached for were the three things we launched on day one.

Extra modules are not features. They are billable anxiety.

barestack.org

10/08/2026

The best form builder is the one you already have.

Google Forms is free. Unlimited forms. Unlimited responses. No paid tier.

Meanwhile:
Typeform from $39/month
Tally from $24/month
Jotform from $39/month

Same forms. Different tax.

If your team is paying for tools with free alternatives, I'm happy to take a look at what else is eating your budget.

08/08/2026

Rippling went all-in on AI at the start of the year. By March the CFO showed the exec team a number: the company was on track to burn 40% of its R&D headcount budget on AI tokens. One engineer alone spent fifty thousand dollars in a single month. Usage was growing 80% month-over-month.

So they built AI Spend Console. Tracks AI spend per employee, per team, per role. Flags the people whose peers keep asking them to redo the work.

The lesson is not "track your tokens." The lesson is: no one set a cap. No one asked what the bill was for. They just kept using it until the bill was bigger than the payroll.

TechCrunch, 7 August 2026.

07/08/2026

We moved our client files off Dropbox last year.

The bill was £7.99 a month for 2 TB. The client list was about 12 GB. I felt like I was renting a warehouse to store a suitcase.

What I actually moved to was not another cloud service. It was a folder on a VPS running Seafile.

The migration took an afternoon. The only real surprise was how much faster the sync felt once the files were not shuttling through a corporate CDN.

What struck me afterwards was how normal the £7.99 felt until I compared it to what we actually used. Most teams pay for capacity they will never fill, in a system they do not control, on a card that gets charged forever.

The same files. A very different bill.

If your team is paying for cloud storage that feels more expensive than it should, I am happy to take a look at what else is eating your budget.

05/08/2026

The best feature is the one you did not have to build.

Most small-business software sells you extra modules to solve problems the platform created in the first place. A new dashboard, a new inbox, a new workflow builder. None of it existed until the vendor decided to bill for it.

We built BareStack because the alternative was buying a CRM with features we would never touch, then paying again when the next version shipped.

If a feature does not earn its place in the first week, it is noise.

barestack.org

03/08/2026

A small thing I noticed while putting together our pricing index.

We pulled 43 small-business tools and read every price off the vendor's own page.
The scheduling category was the worst surprise.

Calendly: $10 a seat every month.
Acuity: $20 a seat.
SavvyCal: $12 a seat.
These are tools for booking meetings without the email tennis.

Then there's TidyCal: $29. Once. Not per month.

Cal.com self-hosts for free.
Same booking page, same calendar sync, no seat charge.
You just need a cheap VPS.

The gap between "convenient" and "necessary" is about $960 over two years for a four-person team.
That's not a subscription. That's a lease.

If your team is paying for tools that have free alternatives, I'm happy to take a look at what else is eating your budget.

01/08/2026

Not more tools. Just the right ones.

A small business owner does not need six subscriptions, a Zapier account, and a CRM that costs more than the client.

They need one place to track work, one place to invoice, one place to store contacts. Most of the rest is noise.

The expensive part is not the bill. It is the switching cost. The retraining. The integrations that break when one vendor changes an API.

Adding another tool feels like progress. Usually it is just another thing to maintain.

barestack.org

31/07/2026

A small thing that saved us money this month.

We moved from 1Password to Bitwarden. $19.95 a month for ten seats felt wrong for something that is just encrypted data on a server. Bitwarden does the same thing for $4 a user a month, or nothing if you self-host.

The migration took about an hour. The only real change was getting used to a different app icon.

What struck me was how normal per-user pricing feels for password managers. You do not think about it until you add a person and the bill changes.

If the software runs locally, why does adding a person cost more?

We build business tools without that seat tax. barestack.org

29/07/2026

Token prices collapsed. Your AI bill did not.

TechNewsWorld reported yesterday that token costs have fallen roughly 98% since early 2024. That is a real number from Windsor Drake's Jeff Barrington, verified on the page this morning.

Enterprise AI spend kept climbing anyway.

73% of enterprises blew past their original AI budgets last year. The reason is not compute cost. It is consumption shape.

A chatbot answers one prompt. An agent fans that prompt out into planning, tool calls, retrieval and verification. One instruction becomes hundreds of calls and five to thirty times the tokens. Actual output in agentic workloads is often only 5% to 15% of tokens consumed. The rest is context overhead.

PDFs are a perfect example. They were designed for rendering, not understanding, so every PDF forces the model to burn tokens reconstructing layout before extracting facts. You are paying a reasoning model to do a formatting job.

Inference is now around 85% of enterprise AI budgets. The meter is on.

Cheaper per-unit cost does not mean cheaper total cost if the architecture wastes it. Same problem, different domain.

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