A Frankenstack is what happens when your tech stack grows piece by piece—tools added over time, each solving a real problem—but never designed to work together as a whole.

It’s the spreadsheet linked to the form, synced to the CRM, exported into a slide deck, updated again in email, and “finalized” in Slack. Every part makes sense on its own. Together, they create a system that’s fragile, confusing, and hard to trust.

No one builds a Frankenstack on purpose.

It forms slowly. One tool fills an urgent need. Another gets layered on to cover a gap. A third is adopted because it’s “best in class.” Each decision is rational. The result is not.

Information ends up living everywhere. The same data exists in multiple places, edited by different people, on different timelines. Teams spend more time reconciling reality than moving work forward.

The most dangerous thing about a Frankenstack is that it mostly works.

Until it doesn’t.

Failures don’t show up as crashes or alerts. They show up as confusion. Rework. Stress before launches. Meetings that exist solely to answer one question: What’s actually true right now?

Over time, trust shifts away from systems and onto people. Someone becomes “the person who knows.” Slack threads replace documentation. Memory becomes mission-critical infrastructure.

That’s when burnout sets in.

This isn’t a call to rip out every tool you use. Frankenstacks are a natural response to growing complexity. But they are a sign that your organization has outgrown patchwork solutions.

You don’t need fewer tools.

You need one place where truth lives—and everything else pulls from it.