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.

The real cost of building it yourself

Explore pricing

The risk for funded SaaS teams isn't a competitor's product. It's time spent on engineering maturity - deployment pipelines, IaC, security, monitoring - that nobody is paying you 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

Backbone provides everything below

Accounts & core services

The product plumbing every SaaS rebuilds

Sign-in & accounts (email + Google/LinkedIn)
User profiles
Email notifications
Document storage & parsing
Action audit trail

Apps & APIs

How customers and UIs talk to the system

Backend-for-frontend APIs
Stateless reference web app
Ready-made API contracts

Protection & scale

Stays up when traffic or abuse arrives

Highly scalable under load
Rate limiting
Shared caching
Health checks
Failure isolation
Edge protection (CDN + WAF)

Production visibility

You can see and run it after launch

Metrics & dashboards
Structured logs (sensitive data masked)
Request tracing
Alerts

Security by default

Trust is verified, not assumed

User & service identity
Least-privilege access
Secrets kept out of code
Private networking
Encryption in transit & at rest

Your cloud, automated

Runs in accounts you own

AWS environments as code
Containers that scale
Databases & object storage
Networking & multi-env layout

Ship continuously

From commit to live without heroics

Build / test / deploy pipelines
Automated releases
Cost controls for non-prod
Load-tested performance evidence

Trust & readiness

Diligence-ready without a rewrite

Audit trails
Compliance-aware control mapping
Architecture decision records
Shared open-source platform libraries
Local dev & docs from day one

Deployed to your AWS account Built & shipped from your GitHub You own all of it - not rented, not hosted by us.

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

How it works

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

Start with Year 3 platform maturity on Day 1

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.

Compliance-engineered Control matrix →

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
Compliance - customer-managed encryption keys, event-driven audit routing, and immutable evidence storage, scored control-by-control against SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA. See the full compliance matrix .

Start with

6 core

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

55k

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.
Every licence starts from the same platform. Production posture scales with you.

Monthly Annual (Save ~17%)

Community

Pre-seed startups who want development to start immediately and a golden path to scale and security.

Free

Development-only platform
AWS environments emulated
Templating service for RAD

Foundation

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

$ 1250 /month

Billed $15,000 annually

Get started

The full Backbone platform
Published performance: 222 req/s on minimal hardware
Email and Slack support

Growth

Established, security-conscious teams launching new products or replacing legacy platforms.

$ 2500 /month

Billed $30,000 annually