Celebrating Five Years of Backstage: From Open Source Project to Enterprise Business

Backstage at Five: How an Internal Tool Became Spotify's Enterprise Business

Five years ago, Spotify open sourced Backstage, the internal developer portal (IDP) framework its engineering teams had been using for years. At the time, the very concept of an IDP was new — the term didn't even exist. Today, more than 3,000 companies have adopted Backstage to build their own portals, and Spotify has turned it into a commercial product: Spotify Portal for Backstage, a SaaS offering that sells the company's developer productivity tools and support to external organizations, from banks to fashion brands.

Tyson Singer, Spotify's head of technology and platforms, explains how the company got into the enterprise software business and why serving both an open source community and paying customers has improved Spotify's own internal engineering practices.

Why Spotify Open Sourced Its Developer Portal

Backstage was already deeply embedded at Spotify before it went public. The centralized platform helped the company's 700 R&D squads tackle a familiar range of developer experience problems: context switching, fragmentation, cognitive load, silos, duplication, dependency management, and tech health. It became essential to how Spotify engineers worked.

But that reliance created a risk. Spotify had previously gone through a painful migration when a custom-built solution had to be replaced by a third-party standard. The company didn't want to repeat that experience with Backstage. So in March 2020, it made the project open source — not just to share, but with the explicit ambition that Backstage would become the industry standard for IDPs. If everyone else was using it, Spotify would never have to migrate off it.

The Push and Pull of Building for Everyone

Open sourcing Backstage meant Spotify was no longer building solely for itself. The company became both maintainer and end user, and at times those roles seemed to compete. The demands of the outside community had to be balanced against the needs of Spotify's own developers.

One recent example: Spotify launched a complete rewrite of Backstage's entire backend system. The effort took a year of work with the community, driven by the recognition that adopters needed an easier way to build and integrate plugins. When version 1.0 of the new backend shipped, the feedback was positive. Community members and enterprise customers noted that adding a new plugin became "a one-liner" and that the new system made things much easier to maintain. Spotify is now applying the same approach to a full frontend rewrite.

The key insight: if Backstage had remained internal-only, Spotify might have kept living with its older, more complicated backend. The community's needs pushed the company to build a substantially better version — one that benefits Spotify itself and that can be delivered to enterprise customers through Spotify Portal's no-code plugin management UI.

A Virtuous Cycle

This is ultimately a virtuous cycle. Building for the community has meant building better software for Spotify's own engineers. The Notifications feature, the Events management plugin, and the API Docs plugin — all community contributions — are used in Spotify's internal Backstage instance today.

The project has improved Spotify's internal software practices, benefited from outside innovation, and enabled continued investment in the ecosystem that feeds back into commercial products. In five years, Backstage has evolved from a thin framework for building IDPs into something better than Spotify could have built alone, and now into a SaaS product positioned as the IDP for the future.

As Singer puts it, investing in the community has been an investment in Spotify itself — one that has brought the company to a place it never could have imagined when the repo went public in 2020.