Working with Macrostack
Four ways to work with us, all self-serve. Before any of them, the part that decides whether the rest is worth reading.
What money cannot buy here
- A ranking.Not a position, not a Sovereignty Score, not a “top pick”. Our order is computed from a published rubric that has no knowledge of who pays us.
- A softened drawback. If your product has a real limitation, it stays on the page. We will correct an inaccuracy same-week; we will not remove an accurate one.
- A competitor's removal. Ever, at any price.
- An unlabelled link. Every commercial relationship is disclosed on the page it appears.
This is not modesty. Readers trust this site because the verdicts are not for sale, and a sponsor is paying to sit beside something trustworthy. Selling the verdict would destroy the thing being bought. If that makes us the wrong publication for you, we would rather say so on this page than in month three.
1 · Sponsorship
Three ways to work with us across 77 categories, 83 tools and 377 verified alternatives. Every entry is researched and ranked exactly as it would be without payment — what you buy is a clearly marked position beside the list, or the guarantee that the facts we publish about you stay correct. Never the order.
Founding rates, and we will tell you why. Macrostack is young — a category page sees tens of views a month, not thousands. These prices reflect that honestly. They are locked for twelve months from signature, so a sponsor who backs us early keeps the early rate while the audience grows.
| Where | Entry cost | Shape |
|---|---|---|
| G2 | ~$250/mo | $2,999/yr for under 50 staff; renews nearer $500/mo |
| Capterra | $500/mo | Minimum PPC spend, roughly $2 a click |
| Software newsletters | $200–$1,000 | Per placement, one-off |
| Macrostack | $75–$450/mo | Monthly, cancel any time, rate locked 12 months |
Our traffic, before you ask
Around 340 visitors a month and growing roughly 35% week on week. Half of them arrive from search — and those readers bounce at 50%, which for a reference site people land on, read and leave is a good number, not a bad one. 83 tools are indexed across Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Perplexity and Kagi.
That is a small audience and we are not going to dress it up. It is also why you are paying a fifth of what G2 charges. If those numbers do not work for you today, come back in six months — we will still be here, and the founding rate will not.
Verified vendor
No placement. Just accuracy.
We check your pricing, licence and feature claims every quarter and fix anything wrong within a week. You get a direct correction channel and a dated “facts verified” marker on your entry.
- Quarterly re-verification of every fact we publish about you
- A correction channel with a same-week response
- A dated verification marker on your entry
- Advance notice before we publish a material change
Category sponsor
A labelled slot beside one category.
A clearly marked sponsor card on one category page, above the ranked list and visibly separate from it. The ranking underneath does not move — that separation is the product.
- A labelled sponsor card on one category page
- A tracked outbound link with your own parameters
- Everything in Verified vendor, included
- Monthly report of impressions and clicks on your card
Layer sponsor
One whole layer of the stack.
Sponsor an entire layer of the five-layer map — infrastructure, models or applications — covering every category inside it plus a placement on the map itself, which is the page nobody else has.
- Sponsor card on every category in one stack layer
- A placement on /stack and that layer’s own page
- Everything in Category sponsor, included
- First refusal on the layer for the following year
No long contract — monthly, cancel any time, and the rate you start on is the rate you keep for twelve months. We will decline a sponsorship in a category where we would have to recommend against you, because a labelled card next to a bad review helps nobody.
2 · Licence-change monitoring
The one nobody else sells. We read the actual LICENSE file of every tool we list rather than trusting a directory, and it keeps finding things: HashiCorp moved Vault to the Business Source License, Outline is BUSL, RudderStack is Elastic 2.0, Dify forbids multi-tenant use. Eleven tools in our catalog are described as open source across the internet and are not.
If your compliance posture assumes a dependency is open source and it quietly stops being one, you find out during an audit. This is a monthly report of every licence change across the tools you care about, with the diff and the date.
What you get
- Monitoring across your chosen dependency list
- An alert within days of a licence file changing, with the diff
- A monthly written summary of what moved and what it means
- Access to the full historical record we hold
3 · Embeddable comparison widget
Put a live Macrostack comparison in your own blog, docs or landing page. It stays current because it reads our catalog directly — when a price or licence changes, your embed updates without you touching it.
Free forever
With a small “Data by Macrostack” credit linking back to the source page. No account, no key, no limits.
Built on our open API →White-label
The same widget without our credit, plus your own styling. For vendors and agencies who want the data in their own brand.
The free tier is deliberately generous. An embed that credits us is a link from a real page on a real site, and links are the thing this site actually needs — so the free version pays us in the currency we are shortest of.
4 · Commissioned procurement research
You are choosing between three or four vendors and need the comparison written properly, with sources, for a decision your finance team will question. We do the research and hand you a document you can circulate.
One condition, stated up front: we will not be commissioned to reach a conclusion. You can commission the question, never the answer. If the research says the incumbent wins, that is what the document says.
What you get
- A written comparison of the shortlist, with every claim sourced and dated
- Total cost of ownership modelled on your actual volumes
- Licence and lock-in analysis, including the exit cost
- A clear recommendation, and the case against it
Free, and always will be
The entire verified catalog stays open at /api/catalog — free to use and cite with attribution. Our methodology and media kit are public. Nothing on this page puts a paywall in front of a reader.
Questions about any of it: team@macrostack.net