Gadget Docs

What is Gadget?

Gadget is a tool for developers to build and run a robust backend quickly by reducing the annoying, repetitive work involved in building great apps.

Key features of Gadget include:

• A hosted database with goodies like backups and automatic indexing
• An autogenerated GraphQL API for your data, with rich documentation and configurable access controls
• Deep connections into third-party services like Shopify with easy webhooks and data sync
• Extensible custom logic supporting whatever behavior and API structure makes sense to you
• Deploy-less infrastructure that allows you to go from development to production instantly

For more on what Gadget provides, see What Gadget Gives You.

Create your first app

You can create your own fully-hosted Gadget app to get started

Create an app

You can always create more apps later at https://gadget.new as well!

Learn Gadget

There are some quick tutorials for learning the basics:

• build a simple Blog Backend
• build a automatic Shopify Product Tagger

Or, you can dive right in and get started building your first model.

Join the Community

Gadget maintains an active Discord community for getting help from fellow developers and the people building Gadget -- come join us!

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Gadget for?

Gadget is for developers who want to ship fast. If you find yourself frustrated by building the same features over and over, or spending more of your time on glue code as opposed to what matters, then Gadget is for you.

Gadget is for people who like to code. While we've artfully reduced the need to write endless code through our abstraction, we still believe that coding is the best way to express complex business logic. So you will still code in Gadget, just not as much.

Why is building with Gadget faster?

Gadget is a cradle for your code. You use the platform to quickly generate the boring and straightforward parts of your application, and then write code to solve the unique parts of your problem. Gadget's platform primitives support your business logic by allowing you to hook in at many points. Gadget runs your application on hosted infrastructure that supplies you with a database, a runtime, and other scalable backend tools that you don't need to manage yourself.

How does Gadget work?

Gadget has two pieces: an editor where you construct your application, and a cloud platform that runs that application in development and production. The editor has tools for building out models that store data and define APIs, for writing code to customize business logic and power HTTP routes, and built-in tools for viewing data and logs. You can use Gadget's editor to write code, or edit locally using ggt - the Gadget CLI.

The application you build is already deployed in Gadget's custom serverless function platform powered by GCP. Data is stored securely and scalably in a hosted database, access controls are already in place, and Gadget is responsible for keeping your app up, instead of you.

Why is there no open-source version?

Much of the magic of Gadget comes from the hosted, batteries-included approach we've taken. Gadget runs a lot of infrastructure behind the scenes so you don't have to, like highly available databases, event queues, dataflow processors, operational tooling, and more. We don't want you to have to set that all up yourself -- it's too much work, and we want to do it for you. As a result, we're not able to offer the developer experience we're aiming for in the open-source model.

How is it priced?

Gadget is free to use for small applications which don't receive much traffic. After the free tier limits are reached, Gadget charges fixed fees for units of request CPU time, stored data, network transfer, and instances of Gadget Connections.

Gadget runs on serverless systems throughout the whole stack, so you're never charged for a running unit of capacity that you aren't using, or unused database capacity.

For more information on current pricing, see https://gadget.dev/pricing.

Why should I trust you with running my backend?

We're a group of seasoned techies with decades of experience building and scaling some of the most popular tech products on the planet. Our backgrounds range from scaling video streaming infrastructure at YouTube, to building commerce primitives at Shopify. We have a lot of experience scaling some of the largest, most demanding backend applications on the planet.

Gadget is the manifestation of all of this experience. We allow you to build a robust backend, with all the best practices of a seasoned veteran, without spending a decade learning the ropes through trial and error.