Free to join, permanently. No affiliate links, ever.
You're renting a growth stack you could own outright
Every tool here does the same job as the SaaS you rent by the month. Same output as HubSpot, Zapier or Intercom, running on a $5 box you own instead of a bill that renews whether you logged in or not. We state the real setup time up front, so you know what the switch costs you in hours, not just what it saves you in rent.
01 / THE PROBLEM
Add it up: analytics, scheduling, email, CRM, support. Five subscriptions that renew whether or not you opened them this month, each priced per seat so the bill gets worse precisely as you grow.
Every one of them has an open-source equivalent that does the same job, on a box you own. The only real question is what the switch costs you in hours.
Cheap is the easiest thing on the internet to claim. So every teardown states what the tool really costs to run: the box it needs, the hours it takes, and the way it can go wrong. A steal that eats a weekend was never a steal.
02 / WHAT'S INSIDE
Everything Zapier does, on your own box. Three people in here moved their whole stack over in an evening. The write-up includes the two things that broke first, so they don't break for you.
Newsletters without the per-subscriber tax.
Analytics that don't need a cookie banner.
Scheduling on your domain, with your data.
Social scheduling you host yourself.
Filter by hours, difficulty and blast radius.
03 / THE HOUSE RULE
A tool with the cost stripped out is just a nice story about somebody else. Anyone can post here, and nothing publishes without all three.
An actual number, not a range. If it took ninety minutes, it says ninety minutes. Rounding down is how people lose a Saturday to somebody else's optimism.
Which of your accounts, what it changes, whether you can undo it. Up front, not in a footnote you find afterwards.
Rate limits, terms-of-service exposure, deliverability. The bit most write-ups leave out, and the only bit that can cost you a domain.
04 / VERIFICATION
You post it with what it does, what it costs, and who it's for. About ten minutes.
We install it, run it end to end, and time the setup ourselves. Usually two to four days.
It does what you said. Published with the real setup time and our notes attached.
It didn't do what the listing claimed, or we couldn't get it running. You get the notes and can resubmit.
05 / FOR CREATORS
You're deciding whether it's worth ten minutes of your evening. So here is everything that decision needs, without making you go and find it.
06 / FIELD NOTES
What people found when they actually ran it. Dated, named and specific, including the ones where our setup time turned out to be optimistic.
Who ran it, when, and what was different from the write-up. We're not filling this with invented quotes to make the page look busier. You'd spot it, and it would cost us more than an empty shelf does.
Run something off the shelf, then tell the room what actually happened: the setup time you got, the step that wasn't in the instructions, the thing that broke. That's the entire contribution. No write-up required.
Join and post one07 / WHO'S BEHIND IT
Nobody here is the expert and nobody is the audience. The person who saves you a weekend this month is somebody who lost one to the same tool last month, and next month that's you for somebody else.
That is deliberately the shape of this place. We started it, we don't run it, and the best thing posted this month was not posted by us.
08 / THE AWKWARD QUESTIONS
Right now it doesn't. It costs the two of us a few pounds a month in hosting and a lot of evenings, and we're fine with that while it's small.
The honest answer about later: if we ever need it to pay for itself, the candidates are a paid job board or sponsored sessions that are labelled as sponsored. What we won't do is affiliate links or paid placement in the teardowns, because the entire value of the shelf is that nothing on it was bought. If that ever changes, it gets announced here first, not discovered by someone reading the small print.
It keeps running, because it runs on your account and not ours. That is the whole reason everything on this shelf is self-hosted or exportable.
The listing gets marked and the setup notes stay up, because knowing a thing is abandoned is more useful than the listing quietly vanishing. If Growth Dudes disappeared tomorrow, your automation would not notice.
The two of us, which is a real limitation and we'd rather say so than pretend there's a committee.
What keeps it honest is that the standard is public and the rejection notes go back to you: if we say no, you get what we tried and where it broke, and you can argue with it. A private standard applied by two people would be a problem. A public one you can hold us to is a different thing.
It has to be free to run. That is the whole premise of the site, so this is the one rule with no exceptions.
Open source you host yourself counts. A genuinely free tier counts, if it needs no card and doesn't expire. A free trial does not, and neither does a free tier so limited that everyone ends up paying. If a listing needs a subscription to be useful, it belongs on somebody else's site.
Partly, and we'd rather be straight about which parts. Some teardowns need a server you're willing to maintain. Those are marked, and if that's not you, skip them.
The difficulty rating and the honest setup time exist precisely so you can tell in five seconds whether something is a Tuesday evening or a lost weekend.
Fair thing to assume in this category. The email is one thing a week with an unsubscribe link in every one, there's no sequence behind it, and joining the community doesn't put you on it.
Get one thing running this week without losing a weekend to it. Or put your own thing up and let us take it apart first.
One thing a week that somebody actually got working. No sequence, no upsell, unsubscribe link in every one.
