Trigger.dev

What is Trigger.dev?

Trigger.dev is an open source platform for writing long-running background jobs and workflows directly in TypeScript. You define tasks as regular async functions in your codebase, and Trigger.dev handles the hard parts — durable execution, automatic retries, queues, concurrency, and scheduling — with no serverless timeout limits.

What is Trigger.dev best for?

Developers who want to run reliable background work — AI agents, video processing, scheduled jobs, webhooks, long ETL steps — without hitting the timeout ceilings of AWS Lambda or Vercel functions. It suits code-first teams who’d rather write and version tasks in their own repo than wire steps together in a visual editor or a JSON state machine.

What can Trigger.dev do?

• Run long-running tasks with durable execution — automatic retries, checkpoints, and resumption after failures
• Schedule work with cron, up to a one-year duration, across DEV, PREVIEW, STAGING, and PROD environments
• Pause tasks for human-in-the-loop approvals, then resume
• Stream real-time results and subscribe to run status for AI responses and live updates
• Customize the runtime with system packages, browsers, Python, or FFmpeg
• Trace and log every run with built-in observability, plus batch triggering and concurrency controls

Is Trigger.dev free?

Yes — Trigger.dev is Apache-2.0 licensed and free to self-host with unlimited runs and no feature paywall. The managed cloud is usage-based: a Free plan with $5 of monthly credits and 20 concurrent runs, a Hobby plan at $10/month, and a Pro plan at $50/month, with compute billed per second plus a small per-run charge on top of the plan credits.

Where does Trigger.dev fall short?

• It’s TypeScript/JavaScript only — tasks are authored in the Node.js SDK, so it’s not a fit for teams that want to orchestrate work primarily in Python, Go, or other languages.
• Self-hosting runs a real stack: a Postgres database, Redis, and separate webapp and worker layers you provision and scale yourself.
• Some cloud conveniences — warm starts, auto-scaling, checkpoints, and dedicated support — aren’t available on the self-hosted build, and self-hosted support is community-only through Discord.

What does Trigger.dev replace?

Trigger.dev is a code-first alternative to AWS Step Functions for orchestrating durable, long-running workflows, and it can stand in for parts of Zapier when your automation is better expressed as code than as no-code steps. Because tasks are plain TypeScript, teams also reach for it in place of stitching together Lambda functions and queues by hand.

FAQ

Is Trigger.dev open source? Yes. The platform is released under the Apache-2.0 license, and the full source is on GitHub — you can self-host it with no feature restrictions.

Can I self-host Trigger.dev for free? Yes. Self-hosting is free with unlimited runs; you only pay for the infrastructure it runs on. Deploy it with Docker Compose or the official Kubernetes Helm charts.

Is Trigger.dev a good AWS Step Functions alternative? For TypeScript teams, yes — you write durable workflows as code in your own repo instead of defining state machines in JSON, and you avoid Lambda’s execution timeouts. If your stack is multi-language or already deep in AWS, Step Functions may fit better.

What do I need to run Trigger.dev? A container runtime (Docker or Kubernetes), a Postgres database, and Redis. The system splits into a webapp layer and a worker layer, both of which you provision and scale.