Backstage: How much does it really cost?

As software engineering teams and their products grow in size and complexity, delivering a good developer experience becomes a strategic priority for engineering leaders. Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) are a force multiplier for developer experience, improving service discoverability, reducing cognitive frustration and mental load, and ultimately boosting productivity and efficiency. This is why Gartner predicts that 80% of platform engineering teams will use these portals by 2026.

Backstage, an open-source project initially developed by Spotify and donated to the CNCF, is a popular choice for implementing an IDP precisely because it’s open-source, and therefore appears to have a low cost to implement. Compared to proprietary IDPs, which have monthly usage costs which are predictable but add up over time, Backstage allows teams to start independently and for very little or no cost (or so the thinking goes). In reality, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of implementing Backstage can be surprisingly high, along with the effort to do so.

Breaking Down the Backstage TCO

Why? What about implementing an open-source solution like Backstage is so expensive? The first and most important thing to realize is that Backstage is not actually an IDP; it is a framework for building an IDP. This distinction is far from semantic and is critical to understand right from the start - Backstage requires substantial development and customization to become a functional IDP. It is not an out-of-the-box ready product and understanding the lift required to set up and run a Backstage IDP is critical for evaluating the total investment required.

1. Backstage Initial Setup Costs

Even just setting up an initial Backstage IDP involves considerable work that organizations often underestimate.

An Entirely Do-It-Yourself Approach

Backstage is often picked because of its flexibility and extensibility. This flexibility is one of its core strengths, but it also means you need to do everything yourself - very little of what you might consider an essential IDP feature works out of the box. Organizations need to allocate significant developer resources to installing and configuring Backstage, as well as setting up plugins and integrations. Getting an MVP instance of Backstage working from scratch can take days or even weeks, involving tasks like configuring core services, setting up entity providers, integrating authentication systems, and customizing plugins.

Skill Requirements

Backstage is typically managed by platform or DevOps teams. However, Backstage itself is built using TypeScript, with a NodeJS backend and a React frontend. This requires skills in TypeScript, HTML, CSS, and frontend development - skills not always necessarily available within platform teams. Developing or sourcing these skills is essential for successfully setting up, customizing, and ultimately extending Backstage into a fully functional IDP.

2. Ongoing Operational Costs

Once the initial version of a Backstage IDP is up and running, there are significant operational costs involved in keeping the portal running. These include tasks such as security patching, managing version updates, integration maintenance, monitoring system health, and the inevitable and unenviable task of providing support and troubleshooting bugs.

Maintenance and Upgrades

Backstage requires regular updates and patches to keep up with changes in its ecosystem. Teams need to allocate resources for system health monitoring, applying bug fixes, and handling version updates. Maintenance can become particularly challenging due to the frequent updates driven by community contributions. For instance, many organizations found the new Backstage backend upgrade complex and time-consuming to manage. Without careful planning and dedicated resource allocation, keeping the portal secure and fully functional becomes a constant challenge.

Support and Troubleshooting

Unlike commercial software, Backstage doesn’t come with dedicated support. Organizations must allocate internal resources or outsource support services, both of which add substantial costs. For even mid-size engineering organizations, maintaining a Backstage instance often requires at least one full-time support engineer - this grows quickly as organizations scale. With 1,600 engineers for instance, Spotify had a full-time team of four engineers working on their IDP.

Bug Fixes and Custom Plugin Development

Bugs are an inevitable part of any software, and Backstage is no exception. Because Backstage is open-source, teams often need to rely on community contributions, which can sometimes delay fixes compared to commercial support. Fixing bugs in an open-source environment involves a combination of tracking down issues internally and hoping for quick community fixes - both of which can lead to delays. However, because much of the real functionality for Backstage comes from a variety of plugins which are managed by different teams, levels of responsiveness and support vary substantially from plugin to plugin. Moreover, teams often need to develop custom plugins to meet specific requirements that aren’t available out of the box. This adds another layer of ongoing development costs, requiring dedicated engineering time to build, test, and maintain these plugins.

3. Long-Term and Hidden Costs

Beyond the initial setup and ongoing operational costs, there are long-term and less visible costs that organizations need to consider.

Long Time to Value

Backstage can take time to deliver value, as it often requires extensive customization and collaboration to build out a robust software catalog. Achieving high levels of catalog completeness involves significant coordination across multiple teams, which can delay tangible benefits and extend the timeline for realizing productivity gains. Many adopters struggle with driving catalog adoption, with some reporting challenges in achieving high levels of completeness even after extended periods. Adoption challenges can result in delayed value realization, undermining the original productivity and efficiency goals.

Opportunity Cost of Developer Time

Implementing and maintaining Backstage requires a considerable allocation of developer hours - hours that could otherwise be spent on core business initiatives. The opportunity cost of dedicating skilled engineers to Backstage rather than focusing on product velocity is often substantial, as tasks like feature enhancements, infrastructure improvement and optimization and bug resolution for customer-facing products may be impacted. This trade-off can ultimately impact a company’s ability to deliver product improvements and address customer needs quickly.

Advanced Functionality Requires In-House Development

Much of the more advanced functionality that large organizations desire - such as cloud cost insights, Tech Insights, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), or other compliance tools - needs to be developed in-house when using Backstage. These features aren’t included out of the box, and the existing Backstage solutions are still in their early stages. For example, the current Backstage RBAC implementation lacks advanced permission granularity, which many enterprises require. As a result, additional engineering investment is often needed to design, implement, and maintain these features. These added costs can be significant, particularly when dealing with complex use cases or compliance requirements.

The Backstage Reality Check

The truth is that building a fully functional IDP using Backstage is a bigger lift than many organizations anticipate. Gartner’s Innovation Insight for Internal Developer Portals report indicates that standing up a Backstage instance is a substantial undertaking, which is something many organizations only realize once they start experimenting with Backstage themselves.

While there are plenty of compelling examples of organizations who have implemented incredible Backstage portals, such as Zalando, American Airlines, and Trendyol, companies looking to create a robust platform like should expect to dedicate two to five engineers for several years. For example, Zalando’s core team working on their Backstage-based solution consisted of three engineers and an engineering manager, actively developing since 2020. The cost of maintaining this team over four years easily exceeds $4 million, with broader team contributions pushing the total investment higher.

Successfully deploying Backstage requires more than technical expertise; it demands a product mindset, as well as skills in project management and developer relations. Top Backstage adopters treat the portal like a product, viewing their internal engineers as customers. This product-focused approach encourages continuous improvement and sustained engagement, ensuring that the IDP evolves to meet the needs of its users. Driving adoption involves actively promoting the tool, onboarding teams, and fostering consistent engagement - activities that are essential for success but may require different approaches and skills compared to traditional platform engineering roles. Many leading adopters have embraced this product-oriented mindset by actively gathering feedback, iterating on features, and promoting internal usage. In cases where these skills are not available internally, organizations may need to consider external partners to help drive adoption and success.

The Roadie Alternative: A Better Way to Backstage

Granted, Backstage offers an incredibly flexible framework for building an internal developer portal, but the complexities and costs of implementing and maintaining it can be daunting. This is where Roadie comes in - a managed Backstage solution that significantly reduces the setup, customization, and maintenance burden.

Roadie was born out of the desire to reduce the complexity and effort required to set up and manage a Backstage portal. For example, Paddle, a technology company, transitioned from self-hosted Backstage to Roadie to alleviate the maintenance burden and complexity involved in managing their IDP. By leveraging Roadie’s managed setup, Paddle was able to cut down their management time and cost significantly, enabling their teams to focus on higher-value projects rather than the ongoing operational overhead of Backstage.

With Roadie, organizations get a fully managed solution that eliminates the need for dedicated engineering teams to spend months configuring, maintaining, and supporting their Backstage instance. Roadie provides a streamlined way to enjoy the benefits of an internal developer portal without the ongoing overhead of maintenance, allowing engineering teams to focus on building features that drive business value.

1. Accelerated Setup

Roadie handles the configuration and customization of Backstage, cutting setup time from weeks or months to hours or days. With pre-configured integrations including SCM tools like GitHub and GitLab, authentication and identity providers such as Okta, and documentation solutions like TechDocs, onboarding becomes streamlined and efficient. Roadie’s solution engineering team ensures you start gaining value from your internal developer portal almost immediately. For more details, see the full list of pre-configured integrations Roadie provides.

2. Ongoing Support and Best Practices

Self-hosting Backstage means managing ongoing bugs, updates, and configurations, which can become a time-consuming challenge for internal teams. Roadie offers a fully-managed service throughout the entire lifecycle ensuring that your platform is always running smoothly on the latest stable releases for Backstage and plugins with no action required from you.

Beyond troubleshooting, Roadie provides support via Slack or MS Teams for any technical challenges that might arise. Roadie’s partnership extends to a full Customer Success engagement, and takes a hands-on approach to helping increase catalog completeness and improve overall platform adoption. This active engagement reduces the operational burden and also empowers teams to continuously derive value from their Backstage instance with minimal friction.

3. Managed Hosting and Maintenance

Roadie manages all infrastructure, ensuring uptime, security, and compliance without effort from your team. Complexities like load balancing, service health monitoring, and scaling are handled by Roadie, leveraging our extensive expertise in delivering highly scalable and performant Backstage instances. This helps organizations realize significant savings and operational efficiencies. Regular updates are applied seamlessly, keeping your portal current without risky manual interventions.

4. Cost Efficiency

The TCO for self-hosting Backstage can reach millions of dollars over several years. Roadie, by contrast, offers a per-seat pricing model, designed to support growth over time. Only engineers actively contributing to your SCM incur costs, which means that as your usage scales, costs remain directly tied to active contributors. Meanwhile, roles like product managers or leadership can access the portal for free, providing visibility without increasing costs. This flexible pricing model ensures that expenses grow in alignment with your organization’s real needs and usage patterns.

5. Focus on Developer Productivity

The primary goal of a platform team is to empower their engineering organization to be more efficient and productive. Setting up an Internal Developer Portal is just one part of that mission - it’s not the sole objective. By partnering with Roadie, platform teams can offload the heavy lifting of setup, customization, and ongoing maintenance of the IDP, freeing them to focus on other high-priority initiatives that drive strategic value and innovation. Roadie’s managed solution allows platform teams to provide a powerful developer portal without getting bogged down in operational overhead.

Conclusion

When organizations begin their journey with Backstage, most envision something more than just a basic software catalog. While setting up a minimal catalog with a few essential plugins might be achievable relatively quickly with Backstage, it is unlikely to meet the long-term needs of engineering teams. The true goal for most organizations involves a comprehensive internal developer portal that acts as the central nervous system for their engineering organization.

A well-functioning IDP using Backstage then typically includes a high level of catalog completeness, advanced role-based access control for secure and granular access, integrated compliance tools for governance, custom metrics dashboards to monitor DORA metrics, and automated workflows that streamline developer tasks from idea to production.

It’s about empowering engineering teams with visibility, efficiency, and the tools they need—all in one place. Achieving this state involves building custom plugins, extending Backstage’s existing capabilities, integrating with multiple internal systems, and making sure the platform evolves as organizational needs change. That’s where the real costs start adding up—both in developer time and operational complexity.

The difference between a minimal setup and this goal-state is significant in terms of the total cost and time investment required. Most organizations underestimate the journey required to go from a basic setup to an advanced, fully integrated platform that drives genuine developer productivity. Roadie offers a managed Backstage solution that takes on this journey for you, making the goal-state a reachable reality without the ongoing drain on your team’s time or budget.