# cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade: a Hacker News curated list of SaaS and self-hosted tools > Tools of the Trade is a markdown awesome list that collects hosted and self-hosted services for running a software business, from payments to log monitoring. It is a reading list, not software, and its value depends on the pull requests it receives. **cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade** — Tools of The Trade, from Hacker News. - Repository: https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade - Stars: 17,178 · Forks: 1,298 - Language: Unknown - License: NOASSERTION - Published: 2026-09-21 · Updated: 2026-09-21 · Language: en - Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/cjbarber-toolsofthetrade ## What Tools of the Trade actually is, and who it is for The repository is a single curated markdown document. Its top level contains LICENSE.md, contributing.md and readme.md, and nothing else. There is no build step, no package manifest, no schema and no generated site. The README opens by tracing the list back to a 2010 Hacker News post by Joshua Schachter asking what services people use instead of hosting their own, and to a 2013 follow-up by Sharjeel Qureshi asking what had changed in the three years since. The README states that the compiler collected more data from Hacker News, AngelList and Quora for a 2015 and beyond version, and that the list covers self-hosted as well as hosted services. The audience is narrow and specific. It is for a developer or founder who has just taken on a piece of business infrastructure, say payroll, transactional email or status pages, and wants a named starting point before searching from scratch. It is also useful as a category map: the table of contents alone tells you which functions a small software company is expected to cover. It is not useful to someone who wants an evaluated shortlist, because entries are links with little or no commentary. ## The mechanism is a table of contents and pull requests There is no runtime. The data flow is editorial: a contributor edits readme.md, adds a link under an existing heading, and opens a pull request. The README says plainly, "It's on GitHub for a reason! Please submit pull requests." The contributing.md file is the only other process document in the repository. The structure is a two-level tree. The top level splits into Business and Tech. Under Business sit Payments, Marketing, Productivity, For Founders, Business Tracking and Analytics, Design, UX, and Others. Under Tech sit Data, Programming Productivity, API, Testing and Monitoring, As a Service, DevSecOps, Simple, Hosting, and Others. Each leaf is an anchor into a list of links. Two structural problems are visible in the README as given. First, Database-aaS and Source Code Hosting each appear twice, once under Tech and once under As a Service or Hosting, so the same category can be reached by two paths. Second, the Contents list includes an entry, Customer Feedback, that is written without a leading hash, unlike every sibling entry. A markdown renderer will not turn that into a working anchor. These are small, but they are the kind of defect a generated index accumulates when nobody owns the file. ## Where to get the list, and what a first read looks like The repository gives no install steps because there is nothing to install. The README points readers at GitHub as the place to get the list and to submit pull requests, and the only files a reader needs are readme.md, contributing.md and LICENSE.md. There is no package to add to a manifest, no binary to download, and no configuration file to write. The project's own instruction is to open the repository on GitHub and read the readme, then send a pull request if something is missing or wrong. A first real use looks like this. Open readme.md, find the Contents list near the top, and jump to the leaf that matches the function you are shopping for, for example Log Monitoring, Transactional Email or Payroll. Each leaf holds a list of named services with links. Read the names, open the two or three that look plausible, and treat the list as a set of candidates rather than a ranking. When you find a category that is missing entirely, that is the signal to open a pull request against readme.md, which is the contribution path the README describes. Because the file is plain markdown, you can read it in any editor or on GitHub itself, and you can keep a local copy by downloading readme.md if you want to grep it offline. ## The list is only as good as its last pull request The repository is not archived, and the last push was on 2026-05-16. That date tells you the file was touched recently, but it does not tell you that the entries inside it were checked. A single push can be a typo fix, a new link, or a removal. Nothing in the repository records when an individual service was added, whether it still exists, or whether its pricing model changed. This is the central limitation. A curated list of SaaS products decays from the moment it is written, and this one has been accumulating entries since at least 2015. Dead links, acquisitions and discontinued free tiers are all expected. The README does not document any link checking, any review cadence, or any deprecation process. There are no releases, so there is no changelog to diff against. The second limitation is scope drift. The README carries a sponsored block for Instabug near the top, including a discount offer, which sits inside the same document as the editorial list. That is a normal arrangement for an awesome list, but it means the file mixes paid placement with editorial entries, and the README does not mark where one ends and the other begins beyond the section heading. ## Tools of the Trade compared with a maintained directory The obvious alternative is a directory that is generated rather than hand-edited, where each entry carries metadata such as a category, a last-checked date and a status. The difference is not the size of the list. It is who does the work. Here, the work is distributed across anonymous pull requests to one markdown file, and the only gate is whatever the maintainers choose to apply. In a generated directory, the work is a pipeline that can be scheduled and that fails loudly when a link breaks. A second alternative is simply searching at the moment of need. If you want a log monitoring service today, a search engine will return current results with current pricing, while this list returns whatever was true when the entry was added. The list wins only when you do not yet know the category name, which is exactly the case it was built for. That is a real but narrow advantage. ## Licence, maintenance and what upgrading means here The licence is recorded as NOASSERTION, which means the repository's licence could not be identified automatically. The LICENSE.md file is present and is the thing to read; the metadata alone will not tell you the terms, and nothing here should be read as legal advice. If you plan to copy the list into your own documentation, read LICENSE.md first. Upgrade cost is close to zero in the mechanical sense and non-zero in the editorial sense. There is no version to bump and no API to break. You fetch the file again and read it. The cost is that you must re-verify anything you act on, because a fresh copy does not carry a signal about which entries changed. The last push was on 2026-05-16, so the file is not frozen, but a recent push is not evidence that any particular entry was reviewed. ## Conclusion Adopt it as a starting point when you need to see which categories of business infrastructure exist and which named services other engineers put in them. Do not adopt it as a dependency, a package, or a source of current pricing and availability, because it is a markdown list with no releases and no versioning. Before relying on an entry, open the linked service, check that the link still resolves, and check the date on the pull request that added it. The repository itself ships nothing you can run, so there is nothing to pin. ## FAQ ### Is cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade good? It is good as a category map and a source of named starting points, since the README traces its origin to Hacker News threads and states that it collects both self-hosted and hosted services. It is weak as an evaluated shortlist, because entries are links with little commentary and the README documents no review cadence or link checking. ### What is meant by tools of the trade in this repository? The README uses the phrase for the services people use instead of hosting their own, quoting Joshua Schachter's 2010 Hacker News post that asked what tools and services people use for things like CVS, mail and mailing lists. The list covers business functions such as payments, payroll and email marketing alongside technical ones such as log monitoring and deployment. ### What are the tools of your trade listed here? They are grouped into Business and Tech. Business covers Payments, Marketing, Productivity, For Founders, Business Tracking and Analytics, Design, UX and Others; Tech covers Data, Programming Productivity, API, Testing and Monitoring, As a Service, DevSecOps, Simple, Hosting and Others. ### What is cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade? It is a curated markdown list of hosted and self-hosted services, collected from Hacker News, AngelList and Quora and published on GitHub. The repository contains only LICENSE.md, contributing.md and readme.md. ## Sources - [cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade on GitHub](https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade) - [Issues](https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade/issues) - [README](https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade/blob/master/README.md) --- Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/cjbarber-toolsofthetrade