BuildShip

BuildShip is a browser-based visual workflow/backend builder: you wire together "nodes" (HTTP calls, database ops, AI model calls, triggers) into flows that deploy as APIs, scheduled jobs, or webhook-driven automations, running on Google Cloud Run under the hood. It's built by Rowy Inc., the team behind Rowy, an older open-source spreadsheet-style admin UI for Firestore/GCP (6,834 GitHub stars as of this check). Rowy.io is still live as a separate legacy product and now cross-promotes BuildShip as its newer, actively developed sibling. BuildShip itself is closed-source and hosted — there's no public repo for its core workflow engine; the buildship-ai GitHub org's repos are docs, SDKs, templates and the older Rowy codebase, not the product itself.

Checked on buildship.com/pricing today: Starter is $19/mo ($225/yr, ~21% cheaper annually) with 20,000 credits, 20 flows, 10 agents, 3 team members, 10 database tables, 50GB storage, 7-day log retention. Pro is $59/mo ($711/yr) with 100,000 credits, 150 flows, 50 agents, 10 team members. Business is $449/mo ($5,391/yr) with 300,000 credits, 300 flows, 100 agents, 25 team members. Enterprise is custom (self-hosting, BYOC, volume discounts, compliance certifications on request). All paid plans start with a 7-day free trial — there is no perpetual free tier on the current pricing page, despite BuildShip's own docs FAQ still saying 'we are a free tier for you to try out.' Credits meter actual execution: 1 credit for a node's first 3 seconds, then 1 credit/second after, with control-flow nodes (Switch, Branch, Loop, etc.) free. Extra credits top up at $10 per 100,000 ($0.0001/credit) on any plan. Two paid add-ons apply across all tiers: no-cold-start ($29/mo or $300/yr) and a custom domain ($80/yr).

BuildShip markets 'self-host under your infrastructure (Vercel, GCP, AWS, Azure)' prominently on its homepage and Enterprise page, but the pricing page's feature matrix lists 'Self hosting / Bring your own cloud' only under the Enterprise tier — Starter, Pro and Business do not get it. What every tier does get is 'Production-Ready JavaScript Export': any flow you build can be exported as clean, modular JavaScript to run yourself. That's meaningfully different from running the actual BuildShip platform on your own infrastructure — it's an exit ramp for the logic you built, not open-source self-hosting of the product.

BuildShip's Enterprise page and homepage list 'SOC II Compliant, HIPAA Compliant, GDPR Compliant, ISO 27001 Compliant' as bullet points, with no linked trust center, certificate, or audit report — a search for a status page (status.buildship.com does not resolve) or a dedicated security/trust page turned up nothing. Meanwhile BuildShip's own Terms of Use (last updated March 12, 2024, still live at buildship.com/terms) state under 'OUR SERVICES': 'The Services are not tailored to comply with industry-specific regulations (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), etc.), so if your interactions would be subjected to such laws, you may not use the Services.' Those two statements are hard to reconcile as written. A buyer with a genuine HIPAA or SOC 2 requirement should get this in writing (a signed BAA, an actual SOC 2 report) from BuildShip directly before relying on the marketing bullet.

BuildShip publishes two named case studies with attributed quotes: Deriv, a trading platform, says it runs over 150 BuildShip workflows in staging and production as an API orchestration layer for onboarding and KYC, per its Engineering Lead Bala Krishna (published Aug 2025). The World Health Organization piloted BuildShip-built AI assistants and self-service mapping tools in Somalia and other crisis regions starting in 2024, per WHO's Director of Health Emergencies Strategy and a Technical Officer, quoted at a 2024 No-Code Summit talk. Both are vendor-published case studies on buildship.com, not independently corroborated by Deriv or WHO's own channels — treat the specifics (workflow counts, accuracy percentages) as claims, not audited facts. Independent third-party review coverage could not be verified this run: G2 and Capterra both returned HTTP 403 to direct fetch, so review volume and rating could not be confirmed.

BuildShip's About page lists a substantial personal-investor roster: Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO), Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross (AI Grant, Friedman ex-GitHub CEO), Balaji Srinivasan (ex-Coinbase CTO), Joseph Jacks (OSS Capital), Worklife VC's Brianne Kimmel, and others. No funding amount or round is disclosed anywhere on the site, and no funding announcement was found via search. The operating entity is Rowy Inc., a Delaware corporation (registered address: 251 Little Falls Drive, Wilmington, DE), doing business as BuildShip, per the Terms of Use.