StackTax
The invoice your architecture never sends.
Every tool you adopt bills you in engineer-hours, onboarding time and cognitive load — not just dollars. StackTax puts a number on the bill so "let's add a service" stops being a free sentence.
- built for
- CTOs
- Engineering managers
- Founders
Why this exists
Why StackTax exists
Adding a technology feels free at the moment of adoption. The licence is cheap or the project is open source, someone volunteers to integrate it, and the demo works by Friday.
The cost arrives later, distributed so thinly across so many people that no one ever attributes it: the extra page in the onboarding doc, the fourth dashboard nobody checks, the upgrade that eats a sprint, the hire you skipped because the interview loop needed a specialist.
StackTax is an attempt to make that bill visible at the moment of decision, when it can still change the answer.
Capabilities
What it actually does.
Total cost of adoption
Licence plus integration hours plus the ongoing tax of one more thing to patch, monitor, staff and explain to a new hire.
Cognitive load budget
A ceiling on how many distinct technologies a team of a given size can actually hold, with a warning when you cross it.
Consolidation candidates
The three tools doing one job, ranked by which is cheapest to remove.
Under the hood
Specifications.
- Status
- Incubating — private design partners
- Inputs
- Vendor spend · repo topology · headcount
- Target
- Q2 2027
Questions
The ones people actually ask.
Is this a FinOps tool?
No. FinOps tools optimise the cloud bill you can already see. StackTax prices the bill you cannot — the engineer-hours a technology choice consumes for as long as you keep it.