✨ Trigger.dev: The developer-first open source Zapier alternative

🔥 TL;DR Trigger.dev is an open source platform that enables developers to effortlessly create event-driven background tasks directly in their codebase – for example, when a Stripe payment fails, open a Linear issue and send an email to yourself, or easily create a drip email campaign. Write workflows using our SDK, and view a detailed history of all runs in our web app.

Hey! We’re Matt, Dan, James and Eric, the founders of Trigger.dev.

👀 The Problem:

• As developers, we find that current workflow / automation tools like Zapier, n8n or Make are great for simple tasks, but not suitable for more advanced use cases.
• Developers often end up creating important workflows in no/low-code tools on behalf of non-technical team members.
• Some of these tools let you drop down into code, but it’s not a great developer experience. Developers prefer using their own IDEs with version control and access to the best tools like GitHub Copilot.
• Connecting together APIs in code is painful – you need to deal with authentication, lots of SDKs and docs for each API you use.
• Some workflows need to use a database query or access very private data. That data shouldn’t leave your servers and you shouldn’t need to give database access to a third-party.

✨ Our solution:

Trigger.dev makes it easy to create workflows in response to API events (webhooks), on a schedule or on-demand by sending your own events.

All of this lives in code alongside everything else in your codebase. We handle API authentication with external services, allowing more time to be spent writing functional code, rather than dealing with credentials. We also support long delays of up to a year that survive your server restarting.

All workflow runs can be viewed in our web app providing great observability for debugging.

🛠 How it works

• Install the Trigger.dev SDK to get access to our custom packages and functions
• Trigger workflows from webhooks, custom events or schedules (CRON)
• Use our growing library of API integrations for the best experience. We will support all of the most popular services, including Slack, Airtable, Linear, Stripe, GitHub, SendGrid, Notion and many more. We’re adding more each week with the help of our open source contributors.
• Support for Fetch and subscribing to generic webhooks for any service.
• Add delays of up to 1 year. Workflows will resume where they left off, even if your server has gone down.
• Observe every workflow run in the app (great for debugging).
• Your private data is kept private – you have control over where your data is sent.
• Our open source MIT license lets anyone self-host the platform.

It’s clear from our launch and customers that developers want to be creating workflows in code rather than in an unfamiliar UI. We expect this trend to continue, especially with the rise of AI code writing assistants such as Copilot and Ghostwriter. Leveraging these tools will only improve Trigger.dev as time goes on, and make the creation of complex workflows more and more accessible to all developers.

🙏 Our asks

If you have a workflow you want to build and would like to try our platform - we would love to hear from you!

• Try us out for free at Trigger.dev.
• Book a 15 min workflow session here.
• Want to migrate an existing workflow? Let us know.

⭐️ Our YC deal:

• YC W23: for 12 months, get unlimited workflows with 100k runs per month for free.
• YC Alumni: for 6 months, get unlimited workflows with 50k runs per month for free.

If you have any questions or want to access the YC deal, please email me at matt@trigger.dev.