Is Inngest Free? Plans, Limits & Pricing (2026)

Last updated: 2026-07-01

Inngest runs event-driven background jobs and workflows with zero infrastructure. Get 100,000 free executions monthly on Vercel or Next.js, Pro from $75/month.

Inngest is a serverless event-driven workflow engine for background jobs, scheduled tasks, and multi-step AI pipelines that requires zero queue or worker infrastructure. The platform offers 100,000 free function executions per month on Vercel, Cloudflare, and Next.js; Pro plans start at $75/month for higher throughput with built-in retries and real-time debugging.

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.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Inngest and who built it?

Inngest is a serverless event-driven workflow engine built by Inngest, a company founded in 2021 and headquartered in San Francisco. It lets developers write durable, step-based functions in TypeScript, Python, or Go that survive crashes, retries, and deployments without managing a queue, worker, or scheduler. Each step in a function is individually retryable, so if step 4 of a 10-step workflow fails, only step 4 retries rather than the whole function. Inngest has raised $34M in total funding across a $3M seed from GGV Capital, a $6.1M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz, and a $20.5M Series B in May 2025. The platform integrates natively with Vercel, Cloudflare, and any Node.js or Python backend, and its TypeScript SDK is open source on GitHub under the inngest/inngest repository. It is SOC 2 certified for Enterprise customers and supports SAML, RBAC, and audit trails.

How much does Inngest cost?

Inngest has three tiers. The Hobby plan costs $0 and includes 100,000 function executions per month, support for up to 5 concurrent steps, and access for up to 3 team members, which is generous enough for development and small production apps. The Pro plan starts at $75/month and raises the limits to over 100 concurrent steps and 15 or more users, with additional executions billed at roughly $0.05 per million beyond the included quota. The Enterprise plan has custom pricing and adds SOC 2 compliance, SAML single sign-on, role-based access control, and audit trails for larger organizations. On the Hobby plan, functions pause once the 100,000-execution monthly quota is used up, and resume on the next billing cycle or after upgrading to Pro.

What does Inngest do that competitors don't?

Inngest's core differentiator is its step function model combined with zero infrastructure setup: developers write normal application code with inngest.step() calls, and Inngest handles retries, state persistence, and scheduling without a separate queue or worker fleet to deploy and monitor. Reviewers in 2026 describe the developer experience, including a visual function timeline for debugging and one-click replay of failed runs, as best-in-class. Multi-tenant flow control lets teams set concurrency and rate limits per customer or tenant, which is useful for SaaS products running background jobs on behalf of many end users. Native integration with Vercel means deploying an Inngest function is as simple as deploying any other serverless function on the platform. The main tradeoffs are a learning curve around event-driven patterns for teams new to the model, and per-step pricing that can add up at very high execution volumes.

How does Inngest compare to Temporal?

Temporal is the heavyweight standard for durable execution, used for complex, long-running, mission-critical workflows across many programming languages, with deterministic replay and workflows-as-code. It is far more powerful than Inngest but also far more operationally involved, typically requiring a dedicated cluster or managed Temporal Cloud subscription and more setup work. Inngest, by contrast, requires zero infrastructure: there is no cluster to run, and functions deploy alongside your existing Vercel, Cloudflare, or Node.js app. For event-driven architectures like background jobs, scheduled tasks, and AI pipelines, 2026 comparisons describe Inngest as the sweet spot between simplicity and durability. Inngest's Pro plan at $75/month is dramatically cheaper to start than running Temporal in production. Teams with extremely complex, long-running enterprise workflows across multiple languages should consider Temporal; teams building typical web app background jobs in TypeScript or Python should start with Inngest.

Is Inngest free to use?

Yes, Inngest's Hobby plan is permanently free and includes 100,000 function executions per month, up to 5 concurrent steps, and access for up to 3 team members. This is enough for many development environments and small production applications without ever paying. There is no time limit on the Hobby plan, unlike a typical trial; it remains free indefinitely as long as usage stays under the monthly execution quota. Once a project outgrows the Hobby limits, typically when concurrency needs exceed 5 simultaneous steps or the team grows past 3 members, the Pro plan at $75/month removes those caps and supports over 100 concurrent steps and 15-plus users. There is no separate paid trial; the Hobby plan itself serves as the long-term free option for smaller projects.

Who is Inngest best for, and who should avoid it?

Inngest is best for developers and teams building background jobs, scheduled and cron tasks, multi-step AI pipelines, and event-driven workflows on Vercel, Cloudflare, or any Node.js or Python backend, especially teams that want durability without running a separate queue or worker infrastructure. Its native Vercel integration and generous 100,000-execution free tier make it a natural fit for startups and small teams shipping serverless apps. Inngest is a weaker fit for teams that already have deep investment in a different orchestration system like Temporal, or for extremely high-volume workloads where per-step execution pricing at scale becomes a significant cost compared to self-hosted queue infrastructure. Teams new to event-driven programming patterns should expect a learning curve, since thinking in terms of events, steps, and durable retries is different from traditional request-response code.

Does Inngest require setting up servers or a queue?

No, Inngest is designed to require zero queue or worker infrastructure. Functions are written as normal serverless code with step calls, and Inngest's platform handles scheduling, retries, concurrency control, and state persistence behind the scenes. On Vercel, Inngest is available directly through the Vercel Marketplace, so a function can be deployed the same way as any other serverless function, with Inngest managing execution from its own infrastructure rather than yours. The same zero-infrastructure model applies to Cloudflare Workers and any standard Node.js or Python backend using the Inngest SDK. This is the main reason reviewers describe the setup as faster than alternatives like Temporal, which typically requires running or subscribing to a Temporal cluster before any workflow can execute.

How does Inngest handle failed steps and retries?

Inngest treats each step inside a function as independently durable: if a step throws an error, Inngest automatically retries that specific step using its built-in retry policy, while successful steps before it are not re-run. If a step exhausts all of its retry attempts, that step is marked as permanently failed and the function moves to its error-handling path, but it will not be attempted again automatically. Developers can replay an entire failed function run with a single click from Inngest's dashboard, which re-executes the function from the point of failure using the same event data. The visual function timeline in the dashboard shows exactly when each step ran, failed, or retried, which reviewers say removes the need to grep through logs to debug a failed workflow. This step-level durability is the basis for Inngest's claim that functions survive network failures, timeouts, and deployments.

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