STACKER

Michael Skelly and Sam Davyson founded Stacker in London in 2017, before the no-code movement had a name. The problem was one he encountered firsthand: small and medium businesses were using spreadsheets to run real operations — managing customers, tracking projects, coordinating teams — but had no way to give those operations a usable interface for people outside the spreadsheet.

The earliest version of Stacker was essentially a portal builder: take the data in your spreadsheet, define who should see what, and generate a working web app. The product found its early customers in professional services firms — agencies, consultancies, small software teams — that needed to share project status with clients without giving them spreadsheet access or building a custom client portal from scratch.

By the time Glide launched publicly in 2019 and Softr raised its first funding in 2021, Stacker had already been building in the same space for two years, serving a steady stream of business users who needed operational apps more than they needed consumer-facing products.

Stacker charges subscription fees based on the number of apps, users, and data connections. The free tier allows a single app with limited data rows — enough to evaluate the product.

Paid plans unlock multiple apps, unlimited users, custom domains, user authentication with granular permissions, and integrations with SQL databases and APIs beyond spreadsheets.

The target customer is a business team that has outgrown managing everything in a spreadsheet but is not large enough to justify hiring developers for custom internal tools. A project manager who needs a client portal.

An operations lead who needs a field team to log job completions. A sales manager who needs a CRM light enough to set up in an afternoon.

These customers pay predictably and churn slowly because the app becomes embedded in their workflow.

Stacker App Builder: The core product — a no-code platform for turning spreadsheet or database data into functional business apps. Supports customer portals, CRM tools, project trackers, inventory management, and operational dashboards with user authentication and role-based access.

Stacker Portal: A client-facing module that lets businesses give their customers a personalized, data-driven web experience without sharing spreadsheet access or building a custom portal. Used by agencies to deliver client reporting and project tracking.

Stacker Integrations: Connectors for Airtable, Google Sheets, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and REST APIs, giving Stacker users flexibility to work with data wherever it lives rather than requiring them to move everything into a specific platform.

Stacker grew primarily through word-of-mouth in the operations and productivity communities. Unlike Glide, which benefited from a viral Product Hunt launch and a large consumer audience, and unlike Softr, which grew through the Airtable power-user community, Stacker found its customers in the quieter world of operations professionals — the people who actually keep businesses running on a daily basis.

The agency channel was important. Freelancers and web agencies discovered that Stacker let them deliver client portals and internal tools in a fraction of the time a custom build would take, and they brought it into every suitable engagement.

Each agency became a mini-distribution channel, introducing the product to multiple end clients who sometimes became direct Stacker customers themselves.

Operating in a market where the product thesis is broadly correct but the execution competition is fierce. Glide has Benchmark backing and strong brand recognition in the no-code community.

Softr has Salesforce Ventures and a dedicated Airtable user base. Retool has raised hundreds of millions and targets the internal tools market from a developer-first angle.

AppSheet is now owned by Google. Stacker is competing against all of these simultaneously while operating at a fraction of the capital.

The classic challenge for a bootstrapped or lightly-funded tool in a market with well-funded competitors is that marketing, not product, becomes the bottleneck. Stacker's core product quality has always been solid.

Getting it in front of the right decision-makers at the right companies is the persistent constraint.

Stacker raised seed funding from a small group of investors who believed in the no-code opportunity before it became a mainstream category. The company has operated leanly, which has been both a constraint and a discipline — the team focused on product quality and customer retention rather than growth-at-all-costs.

Specific investors have not been widely publicized, reflecting the company's preference for building quietly rather than making fundraising announcements.