Trigger.dev

Trigger.dev lets you write long-running, retry-safe background tasks (and, increasingly, AI agent/chat workflows) as plain TypeScript functions in your own codebase, then run them on Trigger.dev's managed workers with no timeouts, automatic retries, queuing, and full run observability. It positions itself as a code-first alternative to no-code automation tools (Zapier, Make, n8n) for developers who want workflows under version control rather than in a separate UI.

Two things stand out. First, the changelog (https://trigger.dev/changelog) is unusually detailed for a dev-infra vendor: each release lists concrete server-side and SDK-level changes with PR links, and the project ships multiple releases a week — three shipped in the seven days before this review (v4.5.12, v4.5.13, v4.5.14), the latest on 2026-08-28. Second, pricing is disclosed in real numbers rather than "contact sales": compute is billed per second by machine size, from $0.0000169/sec (Micro, 0.25 vCPU) to $0.00068/sec (Large 2x, 8 vCPU), plus a flat $0.000025 per run invocation — you can build an exact cost model from the pricing page without talking to anyone (https://trigger.dev/pricing).

Free: $0/month, $5/month in credits, 20 concurrent runs, 5 team members, 1-day log retention. Hobby: $10/month, $10 in credits, 50 concurrent runs, 5 preview branches, 7-day retention. Pro: $50/month, $50 in credits, 200 concurrent runs (then $10/month per additional 50), 25 team seats (then $20/month per seat), 30-day retention, AWS PrivateLink. Enterprise: custom, adds RBAC, SSO, a SOC 2 report, and a penetration-test report on request. All tiers then pay the metered compute + per-run charges above once included credits are used. A HIPAA BAA is a separate paid add-on on Hobby and above. (Source: https://trigger.dev/pricing, verified 2026-08-29.)

The full platform is open source under Apache 2.0 (github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev, verified against the repo's LICENSE file) and self-hostable via Docker Compose or Kubernetes/Helm. Trigger.dev's own docs are explicit that self-hosted is not feature-equivalent to Cloud: warm starts, auto-scaling, and checkpoints (non-blocking waits) are Cloud-only, and dedicated support isn't available self-hosted — you get community Discord support instead. Several operational limits (schedules, alerts, team members, preview branches) are hardcoded at effectively unlimited (100M) when self-hosting rather than configurable. (Source: https://trigger.dev/docs/self-hosting/overview.)

Trigger.dev is a Y Combinator company (batch W23), founded 2022, based in London, with four co-founders (Matt Aitken, Eric Allam, Dan Patel, James Ritchie) who previously built JSON Hero. YC's own company page lists a team size of 9 (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trigger-dev, live 2026-08-29). It raised a $3M seed in August 2023 (YC, Liquid 2, Wayfinder Ventures, Pioneer Fund, Rebel Fund, and angels including Supabase's founders) and a $16M Series A in December 2025 led by Standard Capital, with the same existing investors returning (https://trigger.dev/blog/series-a). That's roughly $19M in disclosed funding and a fresh round four months before this review — a reasonable signal against near-term shutdown risk for a small team running production infrastructure.

Trigger.dev publishes a real trust page (https://trigger.dev/security) stating SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance, regular third-party penetration testing, AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS in transit, and a public sub-processors list and DPA. The latest SOC 2 report and pen-test report are both available only on request to Enterprise-tier customers, not to anyone evaluating the product. Separately, the v4.5.6 release (2026-07-21) was labeled a dedicated "security release" that removed insecure default credentials shipped in the self-hosted image, alongside a dozen other fixes (https://trigger.dev/changelog/v4-5-6) — worth knowing if you self-hosted an earlier version.

The GitHub repo (triggerdotdev/trigger.dev) has 16,153 stars and 1,425 forks, was last pushed to within the last day of this review, and has 427 open issues against a very high release velocity — this is an actively developed project, not an abandoned one (verified via GitHub API, 2026-08-29). Its focus has visibly shifted in 2026 toward AI agent/chat orchestration (chat agent sessions, LLM call observability, MCP server, versioned AI prompts) alongside its original generic background-jobs core — a buyer who wants a plain durable-task queue should check that this direction doesn't dilute the parts they rely on.