We built a free LocalStack alternative — after last week’s changes
Last week, LocalStack moved more core services behind a paywall.
For a lot of teams, that quietly broke something important:
👉 local AWS development that just worked
So we decided to build something about it.
Introducing MiniStack
MiniStack is a free, open-source AWS emulator designed for local development and CI/CD.
It just got featured as Project of the Day on aidigitalcrew.com 🙌
What started small grew fast
- 30 AWS services
- ~2s startup time
- ~30MB RAM at idle
- Single port (
:4566) - 600+ integration tests
- MIT licensed (fully free)
The key difference: real infrastructure
MiniStack doesn’t just mock APIs where it matters:
- RDS → spins up real Postgres/MySQL containers
- ElastiCache → runs real Redis
- ECS → starts real Docker containers
- Athena → executes real SQL via DuckDB
👉 No fake endpoints. No stubbed responses.
Services that are now paid elsewhere — free here
- EC2 (instances, VPCs, networking)
- EMR (clusters, steps)
- Cognito (user + identity pools)
- EBS / EFS
- ALB / ELBv2
Same developer experience
If you’ve used LocalStack before, nothing changes:
docker run -p 4566:4566 nahuelnucera/ministack
aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4566 s3 mb s3://my-bucket
- No account
- No API key
- No telemetry
Why we built this
This isn’t about competing.
LocalStack is a great product.
But local development tooling should be:
- fast
- predictable
- accessible
Try it
⭐ https://github.com/Nahuel990/ministack
⭐ https://ministack.org
Would love feedback, ideas, or contributions from the community.
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