Bootstrappers welcome V1 ready

Own the parts of your stack that matter, without turning infrastructure into a full-time job.

Production-ready, self-hosted infrastructure on a single VPS. Deploy first, understand later.

A paid collection of production-ready infrastructure stacks, reference repositories, and deployment guides.

Production baseline

Deployable today. Understandable tomorrow.

  • Dockerized services with Caddy, SSL, backups, monitoring, and logging
  • Reference repos at git.controlyourstack.com
  • Opinionated defaults that delete most decisions

One-time purchase · Reuse across every product you ship

Control Your Stack helps bootstrapping startups reduce ongoing costs and avoid early vendor lock-in by self-hosting proven open-source tools instead of defaulting to cloud services.

Rather than asking teams to learn and assemble everything from scratch, Control Your Stack provides ready-to-use, battle-tested setups that work out of the box.

The goal is to make choosing the self-hosted option as easy — or easier — than signing up for a hosted service, without giving up ownership or flexibility later.

What you get

Production repositories

Access to battle-tested repos at git.controlyourstack.com with Docker, Caddy, SSL, databases, and deployment scripts. Everything integrated and tested together.

Comprehensive guide

Walk through deployment first, then understand the architectural decisions. Every choice explained so you don't have to reinvent them.

Reuse everywhere

One-time purchase. Use it across every product you build. No per-seat pricing, no metered surprises.

The economics

Cloud services are easy to start with, but they often come with ongoing costs and early lock-in that are hard to unwind later.

A $20-40/month VPS can run your entire production stack. No per-user charges. No per-gigabyte pricing. No surprise bills as you grow.

Self-hosting isn't always cheaper in every case, but it gives you predictable costs and keeps your options open.

Why this matters

Lower switching costs

Standard tools and clear documentation mean you can migrate to managed services later if you want — or stay self-hosted as you scale.

Earlier ownership

Control your data and infrastructure from day one. No waiting until you're big enough to negotiate better terms.

Fewer irreversible decisions

Avoid platform-specific features that make migration expensive. Keep your architecture portable.

What's covered

The guide covers the entire stack, from edge routing and SSL certificates through databases, authentication, payments, email, media storage, backups, and deployment.

Each section explains what problem it solves, why this choice exists, what breaks if you ignore it, and when it stops being the right answer.

Who this is for

This is for you if:

  • You want to ship without infrastructure becoming a distraction
  • You don't want to rent your stack forever
  • You're comfortable with Docker and basic Linux
  • You value predictable costs over vendor convenience

This is not for you if:

  • You enjoy infrastructure for its own sake
  • You want platforms to make all decisions for you
  • You need hand-holding through basic server concepts
  • You're optimizing for "clever infra" instead of shipping

Infrastructure becomes a solved problem instead of an ongoing distraction.

See what's included