Your stack does that.

The Stack Test

Run this before you buy anything with a monthly price.

Five questions. Takes a minute. The result is one of two sentences: your stack does that, or this is a record; keep it. Print it if you like. It works on paper.

  1. Could my stack do this with a connector?

    A connector is a door into a record you already have: your mail, your calendar, your bank, your files. If the thing you are about to buy mostly reads or writes a record you already own, the door is the product, not the app.

  2. Could my stack do this with a skill?

    A skill is a way of doing something, learned once. Checking a draft, formatting an invoice, planning a week of meals, turning a PDF into a table. If you could describe the job in a page of plain instructions, it is a skill.

  3. Could my stack do this with a scheduled task?

    Most subscriptions are really a reminder with a login. If the value is "check this every morning and tell me when something changes," that is a scheduled task. Invisible, always on, never prompted.

  4. Does this need to be a separate relationship with a company?

    Some things do. Your bank holds your money. Your pharmacy holds your prescriptions. Your insurer holds your policy. A separate relationship is justified when the company holds something real on your behalf, not when it holds a feature.

  5. Is this a record I need, or a product I don't?

    A record is where a fact lives: the ledger, the vault, the photo library, the medical chart. A product is a way of looking at facts that live somewhere else. Records earn a bill. Products earn a skill.

How to read it

If question four is no and question five is a product, and any of the first three is yes or with setup, the result is:

Your stack does that.

If question five is a record, or question four is yes, the result is:

This is a record; keep it.

If the first three are all no and it is still a product, you have found something the stack cannot do yet. Those are rare and worth writing down. Tell us.

Two notes on honesty

"With setup" is a real answer, not a soft yes. It means the entry works but somebody has to stand it up: a connector to authorize, a skill to write, a task to schedule and then check for a few weeks. If you will not do the setup, the app is still the honest choice for you this month. Come back when you will.

"Keep it" is not a loss. A record you keep can still be reached by your stack through a connector, which is usually the better outcome: the bank stays the bank, and the budgeting app in between goes away. Some things that pass as records are worth a second look. A password vault is a record and a security boundary; keep it. A notes app is usually a product that happens to hold your notes; the notes are the record, and they can live in a folder.

The first three results of this test, run on real subscriptions the day the site launched, are the first three lines of the Cancel Ledger. One of them says keep.