Over the past six months, Convex has released 10 major versions of our platform. We've added storage, search, and scheduling. Developer projects now use Convex-hosted HTTP endpoints for SaaS businesses, webhooks, and whatever else they need. Long-running actions allow you to perform all manner of computations. We've introduced a pro plan for bigger teams and busier projects.

Over this time, as the platform has matured, many more apps have found a home on Convex. We've seen the creation of creative, fun, and inspiring Convex-based AI apps. People have built games, social, and mobile apps. Just one year ago, we announced our intentions to the world and welcomed the first batch of beta users. Fast-forward to April 2023, and hundreds of teams are building apps on Convex.

Convex didn’t start life as an open-source project. But now that more and more teams are depending on Convex, we’re very excited to begin opening up Convex to the community and the industry.

First steps

Over the last few weeks, our team has released all our major client libraries as open-source projects:

In addition, we are increasingly building out the library ecosystem that runs inside developers' Convex cloud functions in the open. The first and best example is the convex-helpers library, which implements many patterns first introduced as articles on Stack, our developer portal. Stack and convex-helpers form a kind of proving ground where we propose and iterate on tools and patterns with direct feedback from our community.

Over time, some of these helpers will graduate to individual open-source npm libraries maintained by the Convex team that will represent best practices.

We believe the best version of Convex's future involves platform APIs that are tight, general, and minimal. Increasingly, developers' application code will be using higher-level abstractions built on top of those low-level platform APIs. And those libraries will be part of an open ecosystem built by both our team and the greater developer community.

The whole enchilada

But the picture won't be complete without a legitimate open-source self-hosting option.

So Convex will be open-sourcing its backend engine later this year. This means developers will have the option to build and run Convex on their own servers in addition to using our hosted service.

We’re looking forward to sharing a lot more about how Convex is designed and built with the open-source community over the next few months. Stay tuned!