Indeed, ads and subscriptions have been the cornerstone of Spotify’s business model since its inception, though it has expanded into tangential verticals such as concert tickets. However, the company is now exploring another potential money-spinner that has little to do with its core consumer product.

Back in October, Spotify teased plans to commercialize a developer-focused project that it open sourced nearly three years ago, a project that has been adopted by engineers at Netflix, American Airlines, Box, Roku, Splunk, Epic Games, VMware, Twilio, LinkedIn and at least 200 companies.

Today, those plans are coming to fruition.
Infrastructure frontend

The project in question is Backstage, a platform designed to bring order to companies’ infrastructure by enabling them to build customized “developer portals,” combining all their tooling, apps, data, services, APIs and documents in a single interface. Through Backstage, users can monitor Kubernetes, for example, check their CI/CD status, view cloud costs or track security incidents.

Spotify: Backstage in action

While there are other similar-ish tools out there, such as Compass, which Atlassian introduced earlier this year, Backstage’s core selling point is that it’s flexible, extensible and open source, enabling companies to avoid vendor lock-in.

Spotify had used a version of Backstage internally since 2016, before releasing it under an open source license in early 2020. And earlier this year, Backstage was accepted as an incubating project at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Most of the big technology companies have developed fairly robust open source programs, often involving contributing to third-party projects that are integral to their own tech stack, or through donating internally developed projects to the community to spur uptake. And that is precisely what led Spotify to open source Backstage, having previously been blindsided by the rise of Kubernetes in the microservices realm.

For context, Spotify was an early adopter microservices, an architecture that makes it easier for companies to compile complex software through integrating components developed separately and connecting them via by APIs — this is versus the traditional monolothic architecture, which is simpler in some regards, but difficult to maintain and scale.

Spotify was basically in the right place at the right time when the great transition from monolith to microservices was happening. But with microservices, there is a greater need to coordinate all the different moving parts, which can be an unwieldy process involving different teams and disciplines. To help, Spotify developed a home-grown container orchestration platform (which basically hosts the different microservices) called Helios, which it open sourced back in 2014. However, with Kubernetes arriving from the open source vaults of Google the same year and eventually going on to conquer the world, Spotify made the “painful” decision to ditch Helios and go all-in on Kubernetes.

“Kubernetes kind of took off and got better — we had to swap that [Helios] out, and that was painful and expensive for us to do,” Tyson Singer, Spotify’s head of technology and platforms, explained to TechCrunch. “But we needed to do it, because we couldn’t invest at the same rate to keep it up to speed [with Kubernetes].”

This proved to be the genesis for Spotify’s decision to open source Backstage in 2020: Once bitten, twice shy. Spotify didn’t want Backstage to lose out to some other project open sourced by one of its rivals, and have to replace its internal developer portal for something else lightyears ahead by virtue of the fact it’s supported by hundreds of billion-dollar companies globally.

“Backstage is the operating system for our product development teams — it’s literally fundamental,” Singer said. “And we do not want to have to replace that.”

Fast-forward to today, and Spotify is now doubling-down on its efforts to make Backstage a stickier proposition for some of the world’s biggest companies. And this will involve monetizing the core open source project by selling premium plugins on top of it.

“By generating revenue from these plugins, that allows us to be more confident that we can always be the winner,” Singer continued. “And that’s what we want — because, you know, it will be expensive for us to replace.”
Plugged in

Backstage is already built on a plugin-based architecture that allows engineering teams to tailor things to their own needs. There are dozens of free and open source plugins available via a dedicated marketplace, developed both by Spotify and its external community of users. However, Spotify is taking things further by offering five premium plugins and selling them as a paid subscription.

The plugins include Backstage Insights, which displays data around active Backstage usage within an organization, and which plugins users are engaging with.

Backstage Insights showing week-on-week trends. Image Credits: Spotify

Elsewhere, Pulse powers a quarterly productivity and satisfaction survey directly from inside Backstage, allowing companies to quiz their workforce and identify engineering trends and access anonymized datasets.

Skill Exchange, meanwhile, essentially brings an internal marketplace to