Which Stockyard tools should you install first?
The number one question I get is "this is cool but where do I start?" Fair. 150 tools is a lot to stare at. You are not going to install all of them and you should not try to.
So I put together five stacks. Each one is five tools picked for a specific situation. You install them with one command and you have a working setup in under two minutes.
The Indie Stack
You are a solo developer shipping a product. You need to know when things break, show users you are aware of outages, control feature rollouts without redeploying, capture webhooks from Stripe or GitHub, and understand what users are actually doing in your app.
Indie Stack
stockyard install seismograph paddock saltlick corral headcount
This is the stack I wish I had when I was running side projects. You are paying $200/mo across five different dashboards with five different logins and five different billing cycles. Or you are running without error tracking and finding out about bugs from angry users on Twitter.
The SRE Stack
An incident happens. Something needs to detect it, someone needs to get paged, the errors need to be captured, users need to see a status update, and the whole thing needs to be tracked through resolution. That is five tools and five steps in the incident lifecycle.
SRE Stack
stockyard install bellwether sentinel seismograph paddock inquest
The SRE tools market is brutal on pricing. PagerDuty alone is $105/mo for a small team. Add Statuspage and Sentry and you are over $200 before you have written a single alert rule. These five tools give you the complete loop on a $5 VPS.
The Startup Stack
Before Series A you need a bug tracker, a task manager, something to track deals, forms for collecting user feedback, and analytics. The per-seat pricing on Jira plus Asana plus Salesforce will eat your runway faster than your AWS bill.
Startup Stack
stockyard install bounty roundup prospector surveyor headcount
Bounty just got a Kanban board with drag-and-drop columns so you can run sprints without Jira's 47 configuration screens. Surveyor builds forms and collects responses. No per-seat pricing on any of them.
The API Stack
If you are building APIs for a living you spend a surprising amount of time on the infrastructure around the API itself. Capturing webhooks during development, managing API keys, tracking costs, running test suites, enforcing rate limits. Five problems that usually end up as custom code or expensive SaaS.
API Stack
stockyard install corral fence trough assay cutoff
The Personal Stack
This one is for the r/selfhosted crowd. Your journal entries, habit streaks, financial records, reading notes, and recipe collection are all sitting on someone else's server behind terms of service that can change anytime. This stack puts them on yours.
Personal Stack
stockyard install almanac trailhead ledger quiver curator
Each tool is a single Go binary with SQLite. No cloud sync, no account creation, no subscription. Your data lives in a SQLite file on your disk. Back it up however you want.
How to get started
Install the Stockyard CLI if you have not already. Then pick the stack that matches your situation and run the install command. All five tools download in about 30 seconds and start with stockyard start --all.
curl -fsSL https://stockyard.dev/cli/install.sh | sh stockyard install seismograph paddock saltlick corral headcount stockyard start --all stockyard status
Every tool has a free tier. If you want Pro features on all of them, Stockyard Complete is $1 for your first month, then $29/mo. One license key, every tool.
Browse all five stacks at stockyard.dev/stacks. Or just go straight to the full catalog if you already know what you need.
What stack would you add? I am thinking about a "Data Stack" (ETL, visualization, warehouse) and a "Content Stack" (blog, newsletter, link shortener). Let me know what combination you would want.