Introducing the LocalStack for Open Source Program

For many open-source projects, testing cloud-integrated code is a persistent bottleneck. Relying on real AWS or Snowflake environments for integration testing often leads to complex secret management, slow CI/CD pipelines, and high costs – costs that are especially difficult for open source maintainers to sustain. By using LocalStack, maintainers can run their entire test suite in a local container or a CI environment with no external dependencies. This allows for faster feedback loops and ensures that contributors can validate their changes without needing access to a cloud account or risking unexpected billing.

Today, we are excited to share more about the LocalStack for Open Source program, an initiative designed to provide maintainers of non-commercial projects with the same high-fidelity local cloud development experience available in our paid plans. Through this program, eligible open-source projects can receive free Ultimate tier licenses of LocalStack for AWS and/or free Base tier licenses of LocalStack for Snowflake.

The Ultimate license of LocalStack for AWS unlocks over 100 emulated AWS services, advanced IAM policy enforcement, and features like Cloud Pods, which allow you to take snapshots of your local infrastructure state and share them with other contributors. Meanwhile, LocalStack for Snowflake enables you to reduce costs by running your queries and pipelines locally or in CI, with full control over your data workflows and no compute costs. If your open source project relies on cloud services from AWS or Snowflake, LocalStack can be an invaluable platform to improve your development workflow while reducing your project’s overhead.

To qualify, your project must be non-commercial, licensed under an OSI-approved license (such as MIT or Apache 2.0), and show signs of active maintenance. We welcome applications from a wide range of projects, from small utility libraries to large-scale frameworks. The goal is to ensure that the maintainers who build the tools we all rely on have the best possible environment to continue their work.

If you are a maintainer of an open-source project and would like to integrate LocalStack into your development or CI workflow, we invite you to apply. You can find the full eligibility criteria and the application form on our LocalStack for Open Source page. We look forward to doing our part to support your efforts on behalf of the developer community!