Who runs Macrostack
Macrostack is an independent site for one job: helping people choose software — from the app on a laptop to the infrastructure under an AI product — with every price, licence and self-hosting claim checked at its source and dated.
The operator
Fandhaal Studio LLC, Columbus, Ohio, United States.
Fandhaal Studio is a small independent software studio. Macrostack is one of its products, and it is run as one: the research, the code and the commercial relationships are all ours, and every page says when it was last verified.
Contact: team@macrostack.net — readers, vendors, corrections and press.
What we publish
86 tools across 78categories, each with ranked alternatives, head-to-head comparisons, “is it free?” answers, self-hosting guides and migration guides. The work is organised as the AI stack in five layers — applications, models and tooling, infrastructure, chips, energy — so a reader can follow a decision from the software they use down to what it runs on.
Facts are read at the primary source: a licence from the project's own LICENSE file, a price from the vendor's own pricing page, a limit from its own documentation. Where a fact cannot be verified it is left out rather than guessed. How tools are scored is published in full in the methodology.
The rule that decides everything else
Commission and sponsorship never move a ranking. Not a position, not a score, not a verdict, not a top pick, not a drawback, and never whether a competitor appears.
Rankings are computed from a published rubric and editorial judgement, by code that has no knowledge of who pays us. If a paying product is not the best choice for a reader, the page says so — and many of our pages conclude that the product a reader already pays for is still the right call.
How Macrostack earns
Affiliate links. When a page recommends a product that runs a referral programme, the link may earn us a commission if a reader buys. Every such link is marked as sponsored and labelled on the page. We monetise the recommendation we would have made anyway; we never change the recommendation to earn.
Category sponsorship.A company can sponsor one category for 30 days. Its card is labelled “Sponsored”, sits after the verdict and the ranked list, and changes nothing above it: if a sponsor ranks third in its own category, it stays third. Terms and prices are on the for vendors page.
Dataset licences. The core catalogue is open under CC-BY. Five further datasets are available on request for research and evaluation, and a company that wants any of them inside a product can licence it — see the data page. Data is company-level only; we do not sell information about people.
Corrections
If something we publish is wrong, write to team@macrostack.net with the page and the source. Corrections are free for everyone, vendors included, and we aim to publish them the same week. An accurate drawback stays on the page; an inaccurate one comes off.
More: methodology · media kit · for vendors · terms & disclosure · privacy