Enterprise foundations.
Startup speed.

Spend your runway on product differentiation - not engineering foundations.

Backbone gives funded SaaS teams Year 3 operational maturity immediately — forked into your own AWS account in about two days, for a fraction of what building it yourself costs. Book a discovery call now

See how Backbone compares to DIY and adjacent tools.

Computer screen with code

Early adopters: Backbone includes a Fractional CTO engagement

The real cost of building it yourself

Explore pricing

Most funded SaaS teams don't lose ground to a competitor's product. They lose it to a year spent on refactoring engineering discipline and deployment pipelines nobody is paying them for.

  • $200k-$500k - typical direct engineering cost of a comparable DIY platform, spent over 2-3 years
  • 1-2 seniors off product for 18-36 months to build it
  • Deals stall - security review and diligence sit on plumbing you haven't built yet
  • Year two - when MVP shortcuts usually meet buyer or enterprise pressure, and get rewritten anyway

None of that builds the thing investors are actually paying you for.

GitHub free tier
AWS free tier development
1 Backbone licence unlimited environments
Internal build
~ $200k-$500k direct engineering costs over several years
Backbone
From $1,250 per month

Backbone gives teams access to platform maturity that normally only emerges after several years of operational iteration. Compress years of engineering into days of onboarding.
Focus your engineering effort on domain services - not undifferentiated infrastructure.

Build your product. We already built the platform under it.

With Backbone you build one thing - your product - and everything underneath is already engineered, deployed, and immediately operational.

You build this Your product your domain services & UI

Most teams spend years assembling this. With Backbone an engineer can be deploying to an operational AWS account almost immediately.

How it works

  1. Licence - purchase a Backbone platform licence file, see Pricing below.
  2. Fork - your organization is added as a Contributor, so you can fork the backbone-platform repository into your own GitHub org account.
  3. Configure - set your domain, secrets, High Availability and FinOps requirements.
  4. Provision - launch CI/CD workflows into your GitHub account; full release process and infrastructure automation.
  5. Deploy - CI/CD ships it to ECS with security and observability already wired in. Deployed into your AWS accounts.
  6. Own it - your code, your infrastructure, your data. One licence, unlimited environments.
Purchase Backbone licence
Backbone - Featured on KittyLaunch As seen on Launch Llama Newsletter

Start with year-three platform maturity on day one

Backbone is for founding engineers and CTOs with a real deadline - a launch, a customer rollout, or a fundraise - who can't afford months of undifferentiated platform work first.

What changes in practice

  • Protect runway by skipping a six-figure platform build before revenue justifies it
  • Reach production months sooner without impacting product development
  • Reduce launch and early-growth risk with operational maturity from day one
  • Keep engineers on product differentiation instead of plumbing and refactoring

Backbone is likely a fit if

  • You have a fixed milestone - and slipping it costs you customers, runway, or credibility
  • You expect to scale beyond a simple MVP
  • You've seen "fast" architectures become expensive rewrites once growth or enterprise requirements arrive
  • You need production credibility now, without hiring a platform team first

Backbone is probably not for you if

  • Your product doesn't need customer accounts or the operational foundations behind a SaaS company
  • You don't expect scale, security, or infrastructure requirements to become strategic

The proof

Explore Platform features

For your technical co-founder or CTO to verify - this is proof, not the pitch.

  • Core services - caching, throttling, health checks, metrics, boundary logging and fault tolerance all baked in
  • Zero-trust architecture - no server-side sessions, identity verified on every request, services scale horizontally without coordination
  • Automated delivery - GitHub workflows handle build, test, container publishing, and infra deployment across every environment
  • Load-tested, not load-limited - throughput scaled near-linearly through every step tested (up to 222 req/s), clean recovery, no saturation point reached. Published benchmarks.
  • Operational tooling - mature taskfile wrappers and script automation covering all aspects from development through infrastructure configuration to deployments
  • Observability - logging, metrics, and distributed tracing configured from the outset

Start with

6 core

services - auth, audit, document parsing/storage, notifications, user management, BFF proxy

Powered by

31k+

lines of code, GHA workflows, Infrastructure as Code, and operational tooling

Pricing aligned with scale. Not features.

Backbone is a foundational architecture, not a feature bundle.
All clients receive the same production-ready platform.

Monthly Annual (Save ~17%)

Foundation

Funded or venture-backed teams building their first production platform.

$ 1250 /month

Billed $15,000 annually

Get started
  • Full Backbone
  • Documentation and email support
  • Production-ready operating model from day one
Most popular

Growth

Established engineering teams launching new products or replacing legacy platforms.

$ 2500 /month

Billed $30,000 annually

Get started
  • Everything in Foundation
  • Priority support and Slack access
  • Architecture guidance (e.g. quarterly review)

Enterprise

Multi-team, portfolio, or custom commercial terms.

Custom pricing
Contact us
  • Everything in Growth
  • Direct engagement with founder / architect
  • Optional consulting and roadmap collaboration

Want a short fit call, not a feature tour?

Book a discovery call