Developer Hector Vent has released Floci, a free, open-source local AWS emulator positioned as an alternative to LocalStack’s community edition, which introduced authentication requirements and CI restrictions in March 2026. The tool allows developers to run AWS services locally without account requirements or feature limitations.
The timing coincides with LocalStack’s community edition changes that now require auth tokens, restrict CI/CD support to paid plans, and freeze security updates. Floci addresses these limitations by maintaining unrestricted access to local AWS service emulation.
Floci supports over 20 AWS services and passes 408 out of 408 SDK tests, according to the project documentation. The emulator starts in approximately 24 milliseconds with 13 MiB idle memory usage, compared to LocalStack’s 3.3-second startup time and 143 MiB memory footprint. The Docker image weighs 90 MB versus LocalStack’s 1.0 GB.
The project includes services that LocalStack’s community edition lacks, including API Gateway v2/HTTP API, Cognito, ElastiCache with Redis and IAM authentication, and RDS support for PostgreSQL and MySQL with IAM authentication. It also provides S3 Object Lock with both COMPLIANCE and GOVERNANCE modes, while LocalStack offers only partial support.
Developers can deploy Floci using Docker Compose and connect existing AWS SDKs by pointing them to http://localhost:4566. As stated in the documentation: “Use any AWS region — credentials can be anything.” The project is released under the MIT license and offers both native binary and JVM-based Docker images for different deployment scenarios.
