Frequently asked questions

Backbone is an enterprise-grade, operational foundation for SaaS product companies that want to scale securely.

None of the above. It's a top-to-bottom production platform foundation - infrastructure, shared services, deployment workflows, and conventions you can deploy immediately.

If you're building something that needs to run at scale in production - not a throwaway MVP - Backbone is built for you. Typical adopters are startups scaling up, founding teams hiring their first senior engineers, and greenfield enterprise projects.

Yes. Backbone is forked into your GitHub org and runs in your AWS account. You own the code, infrastructure, pipelines, and data. We don't host your runtime.

You can build it yourselves - and most teams eventually assemble something similar. Direct cost is typically ~$200k-$500k over 2-3 years, plus the larger cost of seniors off product while inventing plumbing.

Backbone ships Year 3 operational maturity on Day 1 as one coherent operating model. Compare Backbone to building an engineering capability, not to a single developer tool. See how Backbone compares.

DuploCloud makes almost the same pitch: automate your AWS, Azure, or GCP account, with compliance mapped to SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR baked in. It's the one name here worth taking seriously as a real alternative.

But it's an automation layer over infrastructure you still design - no application services shipped as running code you own. And it's priced by node, not by team: public pricing runs roughly $2,000 to $6,500+ a month depending on scale, against Backbone's flat $15k-$30k a year.

If your product already exists and the job is governing the infrastructure under it, DuploCloud's a strong option. If you still need the application foundation, Backbone gives you both in one license. Backbone vs DuploCloud.

IDPs and portals like Backstage assume a platform team already exists and make developers faster on top of it. Backbone assumes there isn't one yet - it's the operational foundation that team would otherwise spend years creating. Compare Backbone to adjacent tools.

Render, Railway, Heroku, Fly.io - ship-fast hosting. Fine for a hosted monolith when you don't need data ownership in your AWS account or full control of observability, security, and compliance. Painful to leave once the data and runtime live there. See the full comparison.

No - and no vendor shipping infrastructure that runs inside your AWS account can honestly say yes. Compliance certifications attest to how a system is operated in production: policies, personnel, vendor management, monitoring, evidence over time. Because Backbone deploys into your account and you run it, you're the entity being audited, not us. Same logic as owning your data and runtime - compliance ownership follows the same model.

What we do ship: a compliance-mapped technical foundation. Identity, audit trails, network and edge baselines, secrets handling, and observability hooks are built in from day one, mapped explicitly against SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR control objectives in the Backbone compliance matrix - what ships in the platform, and what you still own as the operator. Most teams get to their own attestation faster starting from that baseline than starting from zero.

Published benchmarks show ~222 req/s at 200 concurrent users on two minimal ECS tasks, scaling near-linearly as capacity was added. Performance testing was stopped at just 2 ECS tasks - no saturation point was found, and no ceiling was evident. Your limits still depend on workload. Performance docs have the methodology and numbers.

AWS only today. No Kubernetes complexity required. Opinionated on purpose - simpler ops, faster delivery.

VPC, IAM, Cognito, ECS, ALB, RDS, S3, and CloudWatch. Docs have the full picture.

About $150/month in AWS before significant traffic. After that, cost follows usage.

Yes. You'll add your domain services - and you're free to replace components, change workflows, or code as needed. You'll also get updates from the upstream Backbone repo.

You control your AWS account, code, and data. Backbone platform components are commercially licensed - you keep a subscription for those. Longer-term licensing options may become available as the platform matures.