Inngest
Developer platform for durable background jobs and AI workflows with automatic retries, step functions, and 50k free function runs per month for any stack.
Inngest is a developer platform for building and running durable background functions and AI workflows with built-in retry logic, scheduling, event fan-out, and observability. Functions declared with the Inngest SDK run on any infrastructure and are invoked via events, schedules, or direct calls - Inngest handles the queueing, concurrency, and failure recovery automatically without developers managing message brokers or worker processes. Founded in 2021 by Tony Holdstock-Brown and Dan Farrelly, Inngest has become a popular choice in the Next.js and Vercel ecosystem for adding reliable async logic to AI pipelines. The free tier covers 50,000 function runs per month with no credit card required; the Scale plan starts at $25 per month for 500,000 runs.
Key Features
- Step functions with per-step retry logic - individual steps replay on failure without rerunning the entire function
- Automatic durability without message queues - Inngest handles backpressure, concurrency, and state persistence for you
- Event-driven invocation triggers functions from webhooks, scheduled crons, or programmatic send() calls in one model
- Fan-out pattern runs parallel branches of work from a single event for concurrent AI agent task decomposition
- Built-in observability with a real-time function trace UI showing each step, input, output, and retry history
- SDK support for TypeScript, Python, Go, and other runtimes with framework adapters for Next.js, Express, and FastAPI
- Local dev server replays functions against recorded events for testing async logic without deploying to production
Use Cases
- Next.js teams adding reliable AI pipelines that must survive serverless cold starts, timeouts, and partial failures
- Engineering teams orchestrating multi-step LLM workflows where each step must retry independently on API errors
- Developers replacing ad-hoc cron jobs and background workers with a durable, observable function platform
- AI startups fan-outing parallel agent tasks from a single user request and aggregating results when all complete
Pros
- Per-step retry without re-running from scratch solves the most painful failure mode in long-running AI workflows
- No queue infrastructure to manage - functions run on existing serverless or container infrastructure with Inngest as middleware
- Free tier at 50k runs per month covers most indie developer and small team production workloads without any cost
Cons
- Functions must call Inngest SDK step wrappers to get durability - existing async code requires refactoring to benefit
- Vendor dependency for function state and retry coordination - self-hosting Inngest requires additional infrastructure
- Scale plan at $25 per month may add cost for teams that already have a message queue like SQS or Pub/Sub working well
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