Changes to our stack in 2025
A year-end roundup of all the tools we added, removed, and swapped in 2025
Justin Duke
December 8, 2025
Hey folks! We've made a bunch of changes to our stack this year, and I wanted to do a quick roundup of everything that's changed since we last wrote about it in January.
New additions
| Tool | What it does / Why we added it |
|---|---|
| Blacksmith | Replaced Depot as our GitHub Actions runner (faster and cheaper!) |
| Bunny | DNS management that's simpler and more reliable than what we had before |
| CleanShot | Screenshot and screen recording tool that's become indispensable |
| Granola | Time tracking that actually works the way I think about work |
| Have I Been Pwned | API integration for checking compromised passwords |
| HEX | Data analysis and visualization that's become essential for understanding our metrics |
| Pulumi | Infrastructure as code that's made managing our cloud resources way more pleasant |
| Sendgrid | Added another SMTP provider to diversify our email delivery |
| Tailscale | VPN solution for managing access to our internal infrastructure |
Removed
| Tool | What it does / Why we removed it |
|---|---|
| Depot | Replaced with Blacksmith for better performance |
| Groove | Customer support tool that we replaced with Plain |
| Quickbooks | Accounting software we no longer need |
| Trotto | Switched to Tailscale's built-in solution |
| Valtown | Infrastructure tool we phased out |
| Vista Social | Social media management tool we tried but didn't stick with |
The big picture
Looking at the full list, we're still hovering around the same total monthly spend, but we've gotten way more value out of the tools we're using. The biggest wins have been consolidating tools (like using Tailscale for both VPN and internal links) and finding faster alternatives (Blacksmith for CI/CD).
You can always check out the full stack page to see everything we're using, complete with costs and timeframes. And if you're curious about how we think about tooling decisions, we wrote about our open source funding philosophy earlier this year too.
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