Overview
Trigger.dev lets you write background tasks as ordinary async TypeScript in your repository and deploy them to managed workers. Tasks have no timeouts, can be triggered from your app, scheduled with cron, or chained, and they survive crashes through checkpointing. Waiting for a subtask or for longer than five seconds snapshots the process, so idle time is not billed and does not use concurrency.
Cloud billing has two parts: $0.25 per 10,000 runs and per-second compute depending on the machine size, from a quarter-vCPU Micro to an 8 vCPU Large 2x. The Free plan includes $5 of usage a month; Hobby ($10) and Pro ($50) include usage equal to their price and bill beyond it, with billing alerts available.
Limits differ by plan: 20, 50 and 200 concurrent production runs (doubled in November 2025), queue sizes from 10,000 to 1,000,000 per queue, and log retention of 1, 7 or 30 days. All plans share a 1,500 requests per minute API limit, and cloud runs have a 14-day maximum TTL in the queue.
The project is Apache 2.0 and has a self-hosting guide, which is the route for teams that need their own region or unlimited volume without per-second billing.
Pricing and plans
Free tier
$5 of usage credit a month, 20 concurrent production runs, 10 schedules, 5 team members, 1-day log retention
At the limit Stops at the limit On Free, once the $5 monthly credit is used you must upgrade to keep running tasks.
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5/mo credit, 20 concurrent runs, 10 schedules, 1-day logs |
| Hobby | $10/mo | $10 usage included, 50 concurrent runs, 100 schedules, 7-day logs, 5 preview branches |
| Pro | $50/mo | $50 usage included, 200+ concurrent runs, 1,000+ schedules, 30-day logs, 25+ seats |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom plans and support |
| Self-host | Free | Apache 2.0, run on your own infrastructure |
What it does
- No timeouts
- Tasks run on managed machines for as long as needed, with a choice of seven machine sizes.
- Checkpointed waits
- wait.for, wait.until and triggerAndWait snapshot the process so waiting time is neither billed nor counted against concurrency.
- Schedules and queues
- Cron schedules per project and named queues with their own concurrency limits.
- Realtime
- Stream run status and AI output to your frontend over realtime connections.
- Batch trigger
- Up to 1,000 runs in one API call, with a token bucket rate limit per environment.
- Preview branches
- Separate environments per preview branch on Hobby and Pro.
Strengths and limitations
Strengths
- Long-running tasks without serverless timeouts
- Idle waiting is not billed
- Low entry price at $10/mo with usage credit included
- Apache 2.0 and self-hostable
- Billing alerts at set budget percentages
Limitations
- Task code is TypeScript; Python runs only as scripts called from TypeScript tasks
- Cost depends on compute seconds, so slow API calls raise the bill
- API limited to 1,500 requests per minute on all plans
- Cloud runs queued longer than 14 days are dropped by the maximum TTL
- Free plan keeps logs for only one day
Who it suits
Good for
- TypeScript apps on serverless hosts that need jobs longer than function timeouts
- AI agent runs and media processing that take minutes or hours
- Small projects wanting managed workers for $10/mo
Look elsewhere if
- Python, Go or Ruby codebases
- Very high volumes of tiny jobs, where a self-run Redis or Postgres queue is cheaper
Pricing history
-
Trigger.dev doubles included concurrency and cuts add-on price
Announced 27 November 2025: production concurrency rose from 10 to 20 (Free), 25 to 50 (Hobby) and 100 to 200 (Pro), and extra concurrency on Pro became self-serve at $10/month per 50, five times cheaper than before. Source ↗
Alternatives to Trigger.dev
| Tool | From | Free option | Stages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windmill Open-source job orchestrator, workflow engine and internal-tool platform | $10/mo | Free tier | |
| Hangfire Background job library for .NET | $500/yr | ||
| DBOS Postgres-backed durable workflow library | $99/mo | ||
| Sidekiq Redis-based background job library for Ruby | $99/mo | ||
| Inngest Durable execution and event-driven workflow platform | $99/mo | Free tier | |
| River Postgres-backed job queue for Go | $125/mo |
Questions
Is Trigger.dev free?
The Free plan includes $5 of usage each month, 20 concurrent runs and 10 schedules; after the credit is used you need to upgrade.
How is Trigger.dev priced?
Each run costs $0.000025 plus per-second compute that depends on machine size, starting at $0.0000338 per second for the default Small 1x machine.
Can I self-host Trigger.dev?
Yes. It is open source under Apache 2.0 and has a self-hosting guide.
Do Trigger.dev tasks time out?
No. Tasks can run as long as needed, and waits longer than five seconds are checkpointed and not billed.
Does Trigger.dev support Python?
Partly: a build extension installs Python and lets TypeScript tasks call Python scripts.
Sources read for this page