Ministack, the best alternative to Localstack

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