Toll Stack | Bill Eisenhauer

A paid newsletter for engineers who'd rather build revenue infrastructure than another product — the toll-position idea from The Un-SaaS, gone deep.

At a glance

A paid newsletter that goes deeper into the ideas in The Un-SaaS — for engineers who’d rather build revenue infrastructure than another product.
The thesis, and it’s a quiet heresy: you don’t need distribution or a product to win. You need a toll position — the revenue architecture creators can’t or won’t build.
Written the way the book was: KPacks for the raw knowledge, the book for the spine, my own experience for the rest.
Lives on Substack, with a companion Jekyll site whose repo is already stocked with articles into 2028.

The idea

A boy kneeling on a tree-lined street at dusk, painting the curb white — “He thought he was painting curbs. He was building a route.” One of the Codex-drawn cartoons.

Toll Stack picks up where The Un-SaaS leaves off. The book makes the argument; the newsletter goes deeper, one toll position at a time.

The thesis is a quiet heresy. You’ve been told you need an audience, or distribution, or a product of your own to make it. I don’t think that’s true — not for engineers. You can build the revenue architecture that creators and businesses either can’t build or won’t, and then collect a toll on everything that flows through it. No audience to build. No product to ship. Just the infrastructure nobody else wants to wire up.

Like the book, the articles came out of a stack of context, not a single prompt: a few KPacks, the Un-SaaS manuscript, and whatever ideas I’d have as I worked through my own experience. A stack of context, and me steering.

Where it lives

The Toll Stack companion website with the headline 'You know how to build. You just built the wrong thing.' — tollstack.dev — a companion Jekyll site with a subset of the content.

How it’s made

I used a Codex skill to publish the articles to Substack with computer-use — it drives the browser and posts them for me. The tollstack.dev repo runs well ahead of that; it already holds drafts dated into 2028.

The part I enjoyed most, though, was the art. I had Codex draw the cartoons — the ones in the book and at the top of every article, all in that sepia, slightly-out-of-time style. You can see every one of them, published and not, in the toons gallery.

Is it slop?

Someone will call this AI slop. Fine. But a certain kind of engineer could take this plan, follow it, and build a real secondary income — maybe, in time, a primary one.

And I’ll be honest with you: if things ever go to hell, you’ll probably find me quietly living by these teachings. Quietly — the way the book and the articles tell you to.