Assembly is not product
The first fortnight goes on auth, mail, queues, deploys, and CI rather than on anything a customer sees.
Teams
Fast at the start is easy. Fast in month nine is the point.
A young company pays twice for its stack: once when assembling it and again every time it needs to change. Stacks trades a wide choice of libraries for one typed application where a rename is a compile error and the infrastructure is a file in the repository.
What this always turns out to involve.
The work that arrives whether you planned for it or not.
Pivots hit the schema
The model you launch with is not the model you keep, and refactors are where untyped stacks charge interest.
One person owns ops
Small teams cannot afford a stack whose deploy story needs a specialist.
Hiring against a snowflake
A bespoke assembly of ten libraries has no onboarding path and no documentation.
What is already in the box.
All of it in the same install, typed against the rest of your application.
Day one is day one
buddy new gives you auth, models, queue, mail, dashboard, tests, and a deploy pipeline in one install.
Refactors that are safe
Route, action, model, and view are typed against each other, so the compiler finds callers a grep would miss.
Deploys in a command
buddy deploy provisions and ships, and the shipped CI workflow does it on every green push to main.
Conventions to hire into
Files land where the framework says, so a new engineer reads the same layout every Stacks app has.
Cost control
Server or serverless is a config choice, and SQLite is a legitimate production database until it is not.
Tests from the start
Database test utilities and feature tests ship with the project, so coverage is not a later initiative.
Real companies run on it
BugHQ (bughq.org), StatusHQ (statushq.org), AnalyticsHQ (analyticshq.org), and LogHQ (loghq.org) are production Stacks applications today, and all four are open source. CommsHQ, a marketing and communications platform, is built the same way and ships as either a self-hosted install or a paid subscription.
The layers it leans on.
Every one of these ships in the same install. Follow one to see what it covers.
From the command line.
Buddy scaffolds, runs, and ships this the same way it does the rest of the app.
bun create stacks my-app
buddy dev
buddy deploy
Next door to this.
Projects of this shape usually grow into one of these.