Oakstack vs. stitching it together
A small app ends up needing cron, a webhook relay, PDFs, email, texts, push, and maybe reading documents. Here's what that costs from separate services, and what one Oakstack key gives you.
Side by side
| You need | Separate services (entry paid plans) | Oakstack Builder, $20/month for all of it |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled jobs (cron) | Vercel Cron on Hobby runs at most once a day. Trigger.dev Hobby $10, Inngest Pro $99, EasyCron $24/year. | 25 jobs, every minute, any time zone, retries and a run log. |
| Webhook relay | Svix Basic from $20, Hookdeck Team from $39 (free tiers exist with short retention). | 50,000 events a month, retried for about 11 hours, replay any event. |
| PDFs | PDFShift Starter $9 (500), DocRaptor Basic $15 (125), CraftMyPDF Lite $29. | 1,000 a month, real Chrome, hosted invoice / proposal / report templates. |
| Transactional email | Resend Pro $20 (50,000), Postmark Basic $15 (10,000). Free tiers cap at 100 a day or 100 a month. | 10,000 a month from your domain, bounce and complaint handling built in, PDFs attached in the same call. (Sending to any recipient opens once our email provider's review finishes; test mode works now.) |
| Text messages | Twilio: $2.15/month per toll-free number plus about 1.2¢ a text with carrier fees. | 100 texts and a toll-free number, STOP handled for you (add 500 more for $10). |
| Push notifications | Firebase Cloud Messaging is free (Android), OneSignal Growth from $19, Pusher Beams $29. | 50,000 a month to browsers, iPhones, and Android, one call per user. |
| Reading documents into data | Reducto from $20 per 1,000 pages, Mindee Starter $44, AWS Textract per page. | 200 pages a month (add 1,000 more for $25). |
Prices from each vendor's pricing page on October 12, 2026. They change; check the sources below.
The honest math
For a small app (500 PDFs, 5,000 emails, 100 texts, 10,000 pushes, and 100 document pages a month, plus cron and a webhook relay), the cheapest sensible paid mix comes to about $54 a month across seven vendors: seven accounts, seven API keys, seven dashboards, and seven bills. Leaning hard on free tiers, you can get that to about $20 to $25.
So Oakstack isn't magically cheaper than every free tier. What it changes is the rest:
- One key, one bill, one log. Every email, text, push, job run, and webhook in one place, with what happened to it.
- No surprise bills. Limits are hard caps: when you reach one, that feature stops with a clear error. Most of the services above bill overage by default.
- It composes. Attach a PDF to an email in one call, route inbound email or text replies to a webhook, or have a cron job send a digest, without gluing vendors together.
- Built for coding agents. An SDK, an MCP server, a Claude Code plugin, and docs at /llms.txt that let an agent wire it up from one sentence.
When a specialist is the better choice
Oakstack covers what most apps need. Reach for these when you need more:
- DocRaptor for the best print CSS (Prince engine): footnotes, running headers, paged media.
- Inngest or Trigger.dev for long, multi-step background workflows written in your own code.
- Svix for sending webhooks to your own customers, with an embeddable portal.
- Knock or OneSignal for cross-channel notification workflows, user preferences, and in-app inboxes.
- Reducto for messy tables and complex layouts in long documents.
- Twilio directly for voice, phone verification (Verify), and anything beyond US and Canadian texts.
- Amazon SES directly for the lowest raw email cost, if you'll build bounce, suppression, and reputation handling yourself.
Try it
The Free plan needs no card: test keys work for every module, and nothing is sent until you're ready. See plans and limits read the docs, or start from the Next.js starter (every module in one small app).
Create a free account