Convex

Convex was created in 2021 by three founders who ran the infrastructure organization at Dropbox and raised $26 million from a16z in their Series A round in April of 2022. Using their experience with exabyte-scale projects, they set out to create a fundamentally different database product, one that is highly opinionated. Instead of creating a product with overly malleable settings, Convex was designed to make the hard backend decisions to let users focus on their product.

Unique Architecture

Convex, essentially, is a Backend as a Service that comes with a realtime, transactional database. You interface with Convex using queries and mutations written in pure TypeScript, with automatic caching, built-in auth, file storage, and more. Notably, Convex guarantees top-down type safety when writing your APIs, ensuring that your backend schema matches your function usage on the frontend.

Convex functions run server-side in an isolated execution environment within the Convex database itself. These provide direct efficient access to the underlying data but also to scheduling, storage, general purpose actions, etc. You can think of them like super-charged SQL queries. Functions are automatically available as APIs accessed through client libraries. Everything you do in the Convex backend starts from functions. Read more details about how Convex works on their Stack domain

Self Hosted

Convex open sourced the convex-backend to give back to the community and to make sure that developers adopt their project without the fear that they will be gone in a few years. Also, compliance may require some companies to exclusively self-host their infrastructure. The backend is licensed under FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0.

Billing

Convex offers a Free tier and a Professional plan.

• The Free tier includes up to 1,000,000 function calls and 20 GB-hours for 2 seats.
• The Professional plan starts at $25 per member per month.
• Startups can apply for up to 1 year free of Convex Professional, including no seat fees and 30% off usage-based fees up to $30k.

Convex is currently working on an Enterprise plan with advanced telemetry, compliance, single sign-on, auditing, and SLAs.