From 6 tools to 1: Why I built a dev platform that does it all
At my last startup, things started simple.
We had:
- Home rolled auth
- LaunchDarkly for feature flags
- Chargebee + Xero + eWay + custom logic for billing
- A homegrown permissions layer
- A Postgres table to track entitlements
- And a mess of cron jobs and Lambdas to hold it all together
It worked... until it didn’t.
Every time we wanted to change something, update a plan, restrict a feature, change an onboarding flow, we had to dive into five systems, update config, re-wire some glue code, and hope we didn’t break anything in prod.
Maintaining glue is no one's dream job. It's fragile, time-consuming, and totally invisible to customers.
The ridiculous thing is none of these tools were why people paid us. They were just necessary scaffolding. But we were spending more time maintaining the infra than building the actual product.
That frustration became the seed for Kinde.
We asked what if the boring but essential stuff like auth, billing, feature flags, access control, and custom workflows all lived in one place?
What if auth and billing actually talked to each other?
What if feature flags could apply to both devs and customers?
Where you could run custom onboarding logic without deploying your own infra
So we built it.
Kinde is a fully integrated developer platform that helps SaaS teams get to market faster without duct-taping together six tools and calling it a stack.
Is it opinionated? Absolutely.
Does it solve 95% of use cases out of the box? That’s the point.
For the other 5% it's extensible with BYO custom code and workflows.
If you’re an indie hacker or early-stage founder trying to ship faster (and sleep better), take a look. You might not need as many tools as you think.
