Privacy policy

• There are no accounts on Macrostack. We never ask who you are in order to read it.
• We measure how the site is used with two analytics tools, described below. One of them, Google Analytics, sets cookies — except for visitors in the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area and Switzerland, who are counted without cookies.
• We also keep our own count of clicks on links to partners, sponsors, our “Next step” links and our “What will the GPU cost?” links: a number per day, page and link, with nothing about who clicked.
• We do not sell, rent or trade personal data, and we carry no advertising trackers.
• Some links are affiliate links. We are told that a sale happened, never who bought.
• Block analytics with any content blocker and the site works identically. Nothing is withheld.

Macrostack is operated by Fandhaal Studio LLC, a limited liability company registered in Ohio, United States. For anything in this policy, write to team@macrostack.net. A postal address is available on request for legal correspondence.

Hosting. The site is served by Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel necessarily processes your IP address and request details in order to send you the page. We do not receive, store or analyse those logs ourselves.

Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights. Cookieless, aggregate measurement of page views, referrers, country, device type and page speed. It does not identify you or follow you between sites.

Google Analytics 4. Records page views and a small number of events: a click on an affiliate link or on one of our own “Next step” or “What will the GPU cost?” links, a sponsor’s card being shown or clicked, a dataset download or request (which dataset and the kind of use you picked — never your name or email), and what is typed into our own site search. How it does that depends on where you are:

• In the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area and Switzerland, it runs without cookies. Nothing is stored on your device — no _ga cookie is set — and Google receives a cookieless ping for each page view and event, which Google says it uses for basic measurement and modelling. Without a cookie, one of your visits cannot be told apart from another.
• Everywhere else, it sets first-party cookies (such as _ga) to tell one visit from another, as it always has.

Google applies the right rule from the country your connection comes from, using its consent mode settings that load before the analytics script does. Either way it reports approximate location and device type, and Google states that Analytics 4 does not log or store IP addresses. There are no ads from Google or any ad network on this site, Google’s advertising features are switched off for every visitor, and we do not link this data to a name or an email address — we have neither.

Our own count of link clicks. When you click a link to a partner, a sponsor or one of our “Next step” or “What will the GPU cost?” links, the site adds one to a tally for that day, that page and that link — for example “13 October, /alternative-to-notion, Hostinger: 4”. Nothing about you is stored with it: no cookie, no IP address, no device or browser details, no identifier of any kind. Your browser’s name is looked at once, only to skip obvious robots, and is not kept. The tally is held in our database at Neon and works the same for every visitor, whether or not Google Analytics runs.

That is the whole list. There is no advertising pixel, no session recording, no fingerprinting and no cross-site tracking on this site.

We have built a consent-based system for understanding which topics are being researched — a consent banner, a first-party identifier and an events database. We say so here because it is in our public code. It is switched off, it collects nothing, and its tables are empty. You can check this yourself: /api/intent reports the live state.

If we ever switch it on, this page will change first, the banner will ask before anything is recorded, declining will be as easy as accepting, and it will never store your IP address, your browser’s user-agent string or the full address of the pages you read.

Links marked as sponsored go to a vendor, sometimes through an affiliate network such as CJ, Awin, Impact, Rakuten or Reditus. When you follow one, that vendor or network may set its own cookie so that a purchase can be credited to us. That happens on their site under their privacy policy, not ours. What we receive is a report that a sale occurred and what it paid — not your name, your email or what else you bought. How these links relate to our rankings is set out in our terms and affiliate disclosure.

On our own site (since 2 October 2026). The form at /data/request asks for your name, a work email, your company or institution (required only for commercial use), what you are evaluating, whether you will credit us, and whether you want to hear when the dataset is updated — unticked unless you tick it. We store those answers, which dataset you asked for, the kind of page the request came from (for example “compare”) and when you downloaded the file, in our database at Neon. We do not store your IP address or browser details with it. We use it to give you the file, to reply about a commercial licence if you asked for one, to understand who finds the data useful, and — only if you ticked the box — to tell you when that dataset is updated. We do not sell it, share it, add you to any other list, or join it to anything else we hold. We keep a request for 24 months, then delete it; ask us at any time and we delete it sooner.

Two of our datasets are also shared by request on Hugging Face. The request form is Hugging Face’s, and it asks for your name, your company or institution, a work email and what you are evaluating. Hugging Face shows us those answers so that a person can approve the request. We use them to decide access and to understand who finds the data useful. We do not sell them or add you to a mailing list, and we will delete your request if you ask.

You can also request a dataset by email. Then the only thing we hold is the email you sent — your address and whatever you chose to tell us about who you are and what you are evaluating. It is used for the same two purposes, kept in our mailbox, and deleted on request.

If you email us, we keep the correspondence for as long as it takes to deal with it. Where a newsletter sign-up is offered, your email address is held by our email provider, Buttondown, for that purpose only, and every message carries an unsubscribe link.

• Vercel Inc. — hosting, cookieless analytics and speed measurement.
• Google LLC — Google Analytics 4.
• Hugging Face, Inc. — hosts our datasets and the request form.
• Neon Inc. — our database, in the United States. It holds the dataset requests you submit and nothing else personal — our click tally is in it too, and holds nothing about anyone.
• Buttondown — email, only if you subscribe.

All are based in the United States, so data about visits is processed there. We do not sell or share personal information as those words are used in California law, and we do not take part in any data co-operative or intent-data marketplace.

Google Analytics is set to keep visit-level data for two months; after that only aggregate totals remain. Vercel’s analytics are aggregate from the start. Requests made on our own site are kept for 24 months and then deleted. The click tally holds no personal data, so we keep it for as long as it is useful. Dataset requests made on Hugging Face stay there until you or we remove them.

You can block Google Analytics with a content blocker, with Google’s own opt-out browser add-on, or by refusing cookies in your browser. The site does not change. In the UK, the EEA and Switzerland there is no Analytics cookie to refuse.

If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area you have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to our processing of your personal data, and to complain to your data protection authority. If you are in California you have the right to know, delete and correct. Because we hold no accounts, the only personal data we are likely to have about you is a dataset request or an email you sent us. Write to team@macrostack.net and we will answer within 30 days.

Macrostack is a tool for people choosing software and infrastructure. It is not directed at children under 16 and we do not knowingly collect their data.

If what we collect changes, this page changes first and the date above moves. If we ever begin consent-based collection, we will ask — we will not rely on your having read this page.

This policy was written by the people who run the site, not by a lawyer. We have tried to make every sentence checkable against what the site actually does; if you find one that is not, tell us and we will fix the page or the site.