MiniStack

Yes, MiniStack is free forever under the MIT license. There are no paid plans, no license keys, and no telemetry.

You can start MiniStack with a single Docker command: docker run -p 4566:4566 ministackorg/ministack. No account or API key is required.

Yes, MiniStack runs real Postgres and Redis containers. For example, creating an RDS instance via the AWS API will spin up an actual Postgres container, and you can connect to it using standard database clients.

MiniStack supports over 45 AWS services, including S3, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, Lambda, IAM, RDS, ElastiCache, ECS, API Gateway, CloudFormation, and many more. A full list is available in the documentation.

MiniStack offers features that are now paid in LocalStack's free tier, such as real RDS (Postgres/MySQL), real ElastiCache (Redis), real ECS (Docker containers), and real Athena (SQL via DuckDB). It also supports services like EMR, EBS, EFS, and ALB that require a paid plan in LocalStack.

Yes, MiniStack is fully compatible with AWS SDKs, CLI tools, and Infrastructure-as-Code tools like Terraform. You just need to point your tool to the local endpoint (http://localhost:4566) and provide test credentials.

MiniStack has a very small footprint: it starts in about 2 seconds and uses around 30MB of RAM at idle. The Docker image is approximately 270MB in size.

Yes, there is an official Java Testcontainers module available on Maven Central (org.ministack:testcontainers-ministack:0.1.5) that supports JUnit 5 and Spring Boot.