Inngest: Event-Driven Workflows May 2026

Last updated: 2026-05-31

Inngest runs event-driven background jobs and workflows with zero infrastructure. 100,000 free executions/month on Vercel, Cloudflare, or Next.js. Pro from

About Inngest

Inngest is an event-driven durable workflow platform founded in 2021 by Tony Holdstock-Brown and Dan Farrelly. The company has raised $34M across four rounds including a $3M seed in July 2023 from GGV Capital and a $6.1M Series A in January 2024 from Andreessen Horowitz, with a Series B in May 2025. Based in San Francisco with a 9-person team, Inngest lets developers build reliable background jobs, scheduled workflows, and AI agent tasks on serverless platforms without managing infrastructure. Instead of traditional queues, Inngest is built on a purely event-driven model where everything is triggered by an event. Functions are composed of Triggers (events, cron schedules, or webhooks), Flow Control (concurrency, throttling, prioritization, rate limiting, debouncing), and Steps. Each step is backed by its own job in the queue and retries automatically on failure. Unlike queue-level durability, step-level durability saves costs and complexity. Inngest stores a history of all events for observability, testing, and replay. The platform is serverless-first and runs on your existing infrastructure: deploy Inngest functions alongside Next.js on Vercel, or use Cloudflare Workers, Hono, or any Node.js/TypeScript environment. The TypeScript SDK is open-source on GitHub; the orchestration engine and dashboard are hosted by Inngest. A native Vercel integration automatically syncs your deployed code and sets up environment variables, eliminating manual configuration. Pricing starts at the Hobby tier: free with 100,000 executions per month, then $50 per million executions. The Pro plan costs $75/month. Enterprise plans include SAML authentication, role-based access control, audit trails, 90-day trace retention, dedicated Slack support, and exportable observability. Inngest added MCP (Model Context Protocol) support to its dev server, enabling you to connect Claude Code, Cursor, and other AI assistants directly to your local Inngest functions. Ingnest competes with Trigger.dev (which runs compute but lacks the event-driven model), Temporal (enterprise-grade, heavy infrastructure overhead), and traditional queue systems like BullMQ. Its main advantage is the combination of event-driven architecture, zero infrastructure on Vercel, and generous free tier for early-stage projects.

Pricing

Hobby (Free): 100,000 executions/month, then $50 per million additional executions. Pro: $75/month includes higher limits and advanced features. Enterprise: custom pricing with SAML, RBAC, audit trails, dedicated support. All plans include unlimited dev and staging environments.

Key Features

• Event-Driven Workflows: Everything is triggered by events, eliminating the need to manage traditional queues or worker processes. Functions respond to events from webhooks, external services, or scheduled triggers.
• Step-Level Durability: Each step is backed by its own queue job with automatic retry on failure, saving costs and complexity compared to queue-level durability approaches used by other platforms.
• Multi-Tenant Flow Control: Built-in concurrency, throttling, rate limiting, prioritization, and debouncing controls handle multi-tenant fairness and reliability without custom implementation.
• Scheduled and Cron Jobs: Schedule jobs to run minutes or weeks into the future, enabling time-delayed workflows, deferred notifications, and reminder systems without additional infrastructure.
• Native Vercel Integration: Automatically syncs deployed code, sets environment variables, and manages infrastructure synchronization when you deploy Next.js apps, eliminating manual setup and worker processes.
• Event History and Replay: Stores full event history for observability, testing, and replay. Re-run failed workflows in bulk or test with historical events without re-triggering real upstream sources.

Pros

• 100,000 free executions per month lets you run moderate-scale background jobs and scheduled tasks without paying, making it the best free tier of any workflow platform.
• Step-level durability with automatic retries saves costs compared to queue-level durability, and Vercel integration eliminates the need for separate worker processes or infrastructure.
• Open-source TypeScript SDK on GitHub with active community, plus MCP support lets you debug functions directly from Claude Code, Cursor, or other AI assistants.

Cons

• Proprietary cloud service with no self-hosting option, unlike Temporal or Trigger.dev, which limits control for teams with strict data residency or air-gapped requirements.
• Requires wrapping all logic in explicit step.* calls with cache keys for resumability, which is more verbose than Trigger.dev's plain async function approach.
• Documentation lacks depth for advanced use cases, multi-region setups, and integration troubleshooting, causing friction for non-standard architectures.

Visit Inngest Official Website