Free LocalStack Alternative — 20 AWS Services and counting

LocalStack Is No Longer Free If you've been using LocalStack Community Edition for local AWS development, you've probably noticed the change. Core services like S3, SQS, DynamoDB, and Lambda have moved behind a paid plan. The license changed from Apache 2.0 to BSL. I depended on it for local dev and CI/CD pipelines. Rather than pay, I built a replacement from scratch. What Is MiniStack? MiniStack is a single Python ASGI server that emulates 20 AWS services on port 4566. It's a drop-in replacement — your existing --endpoint-url, boto3 clients, Terraform providers, and CDK stacks work without code changes. docker run -p 4566:4566 nahuelnucera/ministack aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4566 s3 mb s3://my-bucket Not Just Mocks — Real Infrastructure The thing I'm most proud of: the infrastructure services don't fake it. RDS creates real databases. When you call create-db-instance with engine=postgres, MiniStack spins up an actual Postgres Docker container and returns the real host:port e