Defer: A zero-infrastructure platform for Node.js background jobs

Hi everyone! We are Charly and Bryan, and we’re happy to present you Defer:

Defer allows developers to quickly create and run background jobs without infrastructure.

Background jobs are vital in building responsive and resilient web apps by moving slow code outside the users’ journey (ex: pulling and sending data to external APIs, sending emails).

Why are we building Defer?

Bryan and I have been working for 10 years in startups of many stages (pre-seed to Algolia or Dashlane stages).

In all those experiences, part of our work included crafting similar background jobs solutions and their internal dashboards, as Charly did at Algolia for the Shopify Integration Pipeline.

We identified a gap between current solutions and actual product needs that leads to a repeated waste of engineering time (initial cost, support, and maintenance) and bad user experiences across all companies.

As consultants, we also faced companies that preferred to keep degraded user experiences to not invest in R&D in background jobs.

All those combined experiences led us to create Defer to help companies match modern product criteria (great user-perceived performance and an increasing number of integration with external APIs) with minimum effort while keeping the developer experience at heart.

Our solution

Defer enables developers to use a background jobs solution that matches their product needs without reinventing the wheel or building fragile layers.

Defer brings a unique developer experience that makes it easy to create or transform existing functions into background functions (function version of a background job) without the usual distracting boilerplate code that current OSS solutions bring:

Defer’s infrastructure then handles background function executions with the configured parallelism and retries, without infrastructure work or DevOps knowledge.

The Defer Dashboard allows developers to manage applications with multiple environments and get a sense of their product’s health with analytics and filters-rich executions list view:

Finally, developers get notified on Slack upon failure and can quickly access the execution’s logs and business metadata to narrow down the issue and keep users in the loop.

Focus on your product.

Get started with Defer in a few minutes without refactoring or configuration, and start building delightful user experiences:

• Defer comes with a free Hobby plan for developers and small projects 🚀
• As a YC company (current batch and alumni) benefit from a generous YC Deal 💰
• Defer is full-featured: you will find many examples in our documentation 📖
• Want to talk about your use case? Let’s brainstorm together! 🧠