Overview
Manifestack is a stack planning and auditing tool that works inside coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. It examines the complete product—including frontends, backends, workers, infrastructure, and third-party APIs—rather than relying on a single dependency file.
It supports projects from initial architecture selection through ongoing operational review, with recommendations grounded in budget, expected users, data requirements, and the services already in use.
Key Features
- Recommends hosting, databases, authentication, email, and related services for projected usage at 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000 users.
- Checks newly added services against project requirements, avoided vendors, and existing dependencies.
- Audits limits, bills, overlapping services, overbuilt components, and operational risks.
- Reports supporting evidence, timing, estimated cost, remediation, and source for each finding.
- Reads common JavaScript, Python, and Go dependency files alongside configuration, infrastructure files, and environment variable names.
Privacy and Safety
Manifestack operates locally without an account or API keys. Its analysis is read-only: it does not modify application code, configuration, or vendor settings, and the only file it writes is its stack record.
The tool reads environment variable names but not their values. Vendor prices, limits, and regional information are taken from public vendor pages and recorded with the date they were read.
How It Works
On an empty repository, Manifestack initializes a stack based on the product's constraints. On an existing repository, it audits the current architecture, groups detected services by role, and compares them with the project's budget, user estimates, preferences, and requirements.
The resulting findings can identify issues such as duplicate authentication providers, a database deployed in the wrong region, a usage-tier bottleneck, or an approaching storage limit. Each finding is paired with a concrete action intended to help the team address it before it becomes disruptive.
Use Cases
Manifestack is designed for developers, small teams, and agencies that assemble products from independently selected services. It can help choose an initial architecture, review vendor additions made by a coding agent, and forecast which service limit or bill an existing application is likely to encounter first.