On March 23, 2026, LocalStack retired its free Community Edition. The image now needs an account and an auth token, and the free tier is limited to non-commercial use. If your CI pipeline broke that week, you weren't imagining it.
The good news: the gap got filled fast. This post compares the three free options honestly:
MiniStack: free, MIT-licensed, no account, and it runs real PostgreSQL, MySQL and Redis behind the fake AWS
Floci: a native-binary drop-in replacement that starts almost instantly, built for fast CI
Moto: not a server at all, but a Python library for unit tests
A side-by-side table, plus three quick questions to pick the right one
If you were already pointing your tools at port 4566, switching to MiniStack is one docker run away.
— JC
