Founder letter
Why I built Stackrate
April 2026
I started Stackrate in my off hours, late at night after the kids were asleep. Stampli is my full-time role and then some. I opened my laptop, pulled up Claude, and over a few of those late nights I had the first version of something I’d been thinking about for years.
I’m not a developer. I’m the founder and CEO of Stampli. I started the company because accounts payable was broken. We built a great product. We still sell against companies whose products are worse than ours, and we still lose deals we should win.
It isn’t because their marketing is better. It’s because software buying is broken.
A typical B2B evaluation looks like this. A buyer schedules five demos. Each demo is run by an account executive whose job is to keep the conversation on the product’s strongest ground. The buyer asks questions. The AE answers the ones that favor their product and deflects the ones that don’t. Over four weeks, the buyer accumulates five partial, inconsistent, differently-framed pictures of five different products. Then they make a six-figure, multi-year decision based on whichever picture felt cleanest that week.
I’ve been on the vendor side of that process for years. I’ve watched buyers pick the wrong product because our AE had a bad day and someone else’s AE had a great one. I’ve watched buyers pick us when we weren’t the right fit. I’ve watched an entire industry run on this and pretend it’s how procurement should work.
It isn’t. And AI can fix it.
Stackrate reads what a buyer actually needs, in their own words, and answers their specific questions against every relevant vendor using each vendor’s own help documentation, with inline citations. No AE. No slide deck. No deflection. Every claim shows its source. Every “unclear” is called unclear. If NetSuite can do something for a twelve-entity portfolio, the report explains how, with a link to the docs. If Sage Intacct can’t, the report says that too.
This is my first attempt at what I think B2B software buying should feel like in the AI era. Honest, specific, cited, fast, and free.
A disclosure
Stampli is my full-time role and then some. I’m the founder and CEO, I’m there every day, and I believe Stampli is the best procure-to-pay product on the market. Stackrate is a separate company with zero Stampli equity. This only works if you can trust that Stackrate will publish findings that don’t favor Stampli when the evidence points elsewhere. So that’s what it will do. If you’re a QuickBooks-based small business, for example, Stackrate will probably route you toward Bill.com or Ramp. The best product should win. That’s the whole point.
A process note
I didn’t write the code for this. I described what I wanted to a language model and reviewed what came back, thousands of times. A friend told me I wasn’t coding, I was manifesting. That is the most accurate description of this kind of work I have heard. It is also a preview of what I think many more founders will be doing in the next few years: directing AI with taste, judgment, and domain conviction instead of typing into an editor.
A pricing note
Stackrate is free for every buyer, forever. Vendors get their first 180 days on any paid tier free, starting the day their claim is approved. After that, a monthly subscription keeps the listing active and earns the ability to respond, train the AI, and receive opted-in leads. Right now I’m covering the API costs personally because I want to see what gets built when there’s little gate on the vendor side either. If this proves useful, vendors will convert after their trial. If it doesn’t, we’ll learn something about what buyers actually want.
If you’ve recently evaluated AP, procurement, close, or FP&A software, I would especially like to hear from you. Run a comparison for the situation you were in, and tell me what Stackrate got right and where it got things wrong. That’s how this improves.
A report takes about a minute.