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Build a stack that fits a budget

Set a monthly ceiling and the page fills it one category at a time, taking the best-ranked tool each category can still afford. Switch a category off if you already have it covered, and the rest of the budget redistributes.

26

categories a budget can draw from

the builder

Pick a ceiling, see what fits

Priced from the 150 tools this page carries, out of 475 priced tools in the catalog — the other 325 are left out so the page does not ship the whole catalog to your browser. Each category contributes at most one tool, at its cheapest paid plan.

Monthly ceiling

Categories in play

$100/mo

of a $100/mo ceiling · $0/mo left

4 tools · one per category

what the fill is

This is a greedy fill, not an optimum

Worth knowing before you treat the result as a recommendation.

The builder walks the categories in the catalog's own ranking order and takes the first tool each one can still afford. It never backtracks, so an early expensive pick can spend money that two later categories would have used better. A solver would return a cheaper basket — and usually one no developer would recognise as a working stack.

Treat the result as a starting point for a shortlist, not as the cheapest combination that exists. The categories you switch off matter more than the algorithm does: nobody needs a tool in every category, and the ones you already have covered are the ones worth excluding first.

How this was computed

  • Every price is the published plan price normalized to monthly USD. A yearly plan is divided by twelve; nothing else is adjusted.
  • Per-seat plans are counted at one seat. A card says "per user" where that applies, so a team should multiply before believing the ceiling holds.
  • Non-USD, usage-metered, one-time and quote-only plans have no honest monthly equivalent and are excluded rather than converted at a rate this site does not have.
  • Of the 150 tools this page can pick from, 70 carry editor-entered plan rows with a source URL; the rest are read from the editorial pricing summary, and every card priced that way marks itself "from pricing summary".
  • Each tool enters at its cheapest plan that actually bills — a free tier is not counted as a $0 plan, because a stack assembled out of free tiers answers a different question.
  • The total is a list price, not a quote. It excludes tax, annual-commitment discounts, negotiated rates, overages, and anything a vendor charges outside the plan.

Recomputed August 31, 2026 · scoring rubric & evidence rules · open dataset (CC-BY 4.0)

keep reading

Open source vs paid developer toolsThe open-source share of the catalog, by category and pricing model — including what open-source tools charge for their hosted plans.The state of AI developer toolsThe whole catalog in one read — licensing, pricing, category density, and shutdowns, recomputed from live data.Which tools changed pricing recently?Every recorded price move, newest first: which plan changed, from what, to what.