The Tech Stack Temp Check

Take your stack's temperature. Find out if things are running cool — or quietly overheating.

2-3 minutes. No logins. Check every box that sounds like your business — and if you don't know the answer, that's a check too.

Reading One

Money going out the door

I couldn't list every app and subscription I pay for without looking it up There's at least one tool we pay for that nobody has logged into in 90+ days Two or more of our tools do basically the same thing Our email/SMS platform bill has gone up, but I couldn't tell you what we're getting for the increase I'm a little scared to look at the itemized bill I've never compared what we pay against what a business our size should pay

Reading Two

Numbers that don't add up

My ad platforms, analytics, and store all report different revenue — and I've stopped asking why I couldn't confidently say what my actual blended cost to acquire a customer is We make ad spend decisions based on a dashboard nobody has ever verified "I just look at the bank account, honestly" is my reporting system Reporting lives in five different places and someone stitches it together by hand (or nobody does)

Reading Three

Email & SMS

We have flows that were set up once and haven't been touched in over a year I don't know what percentage of our list is actually engaged We're sending to people who haven't opened anything in six months (and paying to do it) The person who set up our segments doesn't work here anymore — and nobody's sure how they work now

Reading Four

Shipping & fulfillment

Our shipping rates and rules were set up during a busy season and never revisited I'm not confident we're charging customers the right amount for shipping Orders occasionally do something weird and we fix them by hand I don't actually know if our fulfillment costs are normal for our volume

Reading Five

Things not talking to each other

Someone on our team regularly copies data from one tool into another We've had inventory, order, or customer data be wrong in one system but right in another When something breaks between two tools, we find out from a customer Somewhere in the stack there's a connection held together with duct tape and a Zapier

Reading Six

The platform itself

Someone here has said "don't touch it — it works and I don't know why" We've "outgrown" our setup but keep patching it because migrating sounds terrifying Our checkout or site has workarounds that exist because of a limitation nobody's re-examined "We'll fix it after BFCM" has been said more than once. About the same thing.

Your Reading

What the thermometer says

Running cool0–3 checks

Honestly? You're in better shape than most. Bookmark this and take your temperature again in six months.

Running warm4–8 checks

You've got leaks. Probably a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month of them, plus decisions being made on numbers you shouldn't trust.

Running hot9+ checks

Your stack is running you. The good news: this is almost always fixable, and the fixes usually pay for themselves fast.

What a temperature can't tell you

A reading isn't a diagnosis.

The Temp Check tells you something's warm. It won't tell you which boxes are costing you $40 a month and which are costing you $4,000 — what to kill first, what's actually fine, or how the fixes connect to each other.

That's what The Big Bad Audit is — a full teardown of your stack, every finding sorted into five buckets, each with a dollar figure attached:

Kill. Right‑size. Fix. Connect. Add.

Running warm? Let's talk →

— Ben

Print me, share me, send me to the merchant friend who's scared of their itemized bill.