Mag Studios
A small indie studio building consumer apps and editorial sites on indie budgets. cheapstack is one of those projects — the others are real products that pay our cheapstack receipts.
How we work
Small budgets, real products, public methodology. The thesis is that you can ship credibly without a $5k/mo infrastructure bill, and that someone ought to write down the actual numbers so the next person can copy the homework.
Every Mag Studios project is built on a stack from this site — or the stack on this site is the receipt for one of those projects. The site is the methodology and the products are the proof. When we recommend Resend for transactional, it’s because it’s the bill we send. When we recommend Cloudflare Pages for landing pages, it’s because that’s where our landing pages live.
We don’t take VC. We don’t have an editorial calendar that syncs with sponsorship deals. We don’t hire ghostwriters. The perspective on this site is one person’s, and we keep it that way because the alternative loses what makes it useful.
What else we build
Mag Studios builds a portfolio of consumer mobile apps and a couple of editorial sites — cheapstack is the editorial side. The mobile apps are how we test the stacks we recommend at consumer scale (where 100k MAU is a real number, not a stress-test).
We don’t link to the apps from this site by default — cheapstack’s editorial integrity depends on us not promoting our own things sideways. The stacks they run on are the same ones documented here; if you’re curious, the public git history occasionally notes which Mag Studios product motivated a stack-guide update.
Reaching the studio
cheapstack-related questions, corrections, or pitch ideas go to hello@cheapstack.dev (see contact for the full breakdown).
General Mag Studios inquiries (product partnerships, app review requests, etc.) can go to the same address — one inbox, slow but read. We don’t take freelance work or contract development through cheapstack; the studio is full-on internal-products.