Spotify Plugins for Backstage

Beta

To start using the plugins, please contact us. We will guide you through the process and get you set up with the plugins.

All of the installation instructions for the Spotify Plugins for Backstage are public via these npm packages. 

We are structuring pricing as an annual subscription with customers gaining access to all plugins offered in the bundle.

In our alpha and closed beta testing, we learned that pricing flexibility based on individual parameters like Backstage usage and capacity within an organization is what works best for our customers. In this open beta period, we’re committed to building relationships with our customers and demonstrating our commitment to building value within the subscription. Please contact us if you are interested in learning more.

That’s OK! There is no one way to improve developer effectiveness. Each of these plugins does its part. At Spotify, we use the internal versions of these plugins collectively in that effort. As such, we're packaging these plugins as a bundle, providing everything we think and hear you need to successfully improve the productivity and happiness of your developers.

Our aim is to provide comprehensive solutions that work effectively together and provide incremental value as your organization evolves. We believe that all these plugins can add value to your Backstage application and company over time. If you’re not ready to use all of them at once, you can install whichever plugins best suit your needs and have access to the other plugins whenever you want.

Before we open-sourced it, our teams at Spotify knew what we had with Backstage was special. Our developers loved it and we’d proven that it was driving a better developer experience, and ultimately our business’s success. The success of Backstage in open source showed us that there was more Spotify could share about what we’ve learned and ship more of our engineering culture beyond our teams.

These plugins are designed to complement the open source platform and plugins you already enjoy, bringing even more of Spotify’s experience and maturity with Backstage to the overall platform. We hope that by adding paid plugins from Spotify to the other commercial services surrounding Backstage, the platform becomes more valuable to current adopters, we broaden Backstage’s reach to new adopters, and we create a more diverse ecosystem for the community at large.

The bundle subscription is also how we see Spotify continuing to sustain its investment in Backstage. Revenue generated from the bundle can be reinvested into developing and releasing more plugins — including more of the 200+ plugins we use internally — and evolving Backstage further. We see this as a good thing for our community, our teams, and our customers.

Customers should expect Spotify-provided support for the plugins included in the bundle (e.g. onboarding, troubleshooting, etc.). Moving forward, we’re evaluating enterprise support for Backstage, and any interested customers should let us know!

Right now, we’re focused on delivering value through the subscription with our initial set of open beta plugins. The overarching question we asked when developing these plugins was “will this make Backstage more useful and powerful for open source adopters?” And that’s the question we’ll continue to ask as we evolve the subscription. 

No, these plugins are closed source and the license is owned by Spotify. We are always open to feedback and feature requests, but in order to provide the quality of support, we believe they must remain this way. If you have a feature request, please let us know or contribute it to the open source community.

Similar to how we work with mature open source integrators, we’re excited to unlock the value of these plugins for everyone who uses Backstage. Please fill out this form and we’ll be in touch to discuss how we can support you. 

Not yet. We are still learning about how adopters can best integrate these capabilities and the degree of support they need to be successful.