5 Ways Temporal Cloud Can Help Startups

We’ve frequently heard from developers at startups that Temporal Cloud would provide substantial benefits for their projects, but remains just out of reach of their limited budgets. To help these developers, we recently launched Temporal Cloud for Startups, which provides startups with free credits and the support they need to make their projects a success.

The early results have been really positive–almost two hundred startups have signed up over the past two months, and we’re already working closely with many of them.

But we’re also hearing some questions. How does Temporal Cloud help startups specifically? Isn’t Temporal meant for applications operating at large scale?

We talked to a few startups to learn how Temporal Cloud helps them, and here are the top five reasons.

1. Deliver new features faster to reach product-market fit.

Temporal’s core value proposition is it lets you focus on building your business logic rather than engineering for state management. Temporal is a programming model that abstracts away state management and automatically handles state in the background. This abstraction saves you from hours of writing retry policies, exponential backoffs, cron jobs, and the list goes on.

The result is ridiculously faster development. Startups using Temporal have reported 2-10x faster development velocity. That means faster time to market, faster iteration, faster product-market fit, and a competitive advantage. As one developer put it, “We’re a speedboat driving circles around the ocean liners.”

2. Win the trust of early customers with good reliability.

It’s hard to overstate how critical it is to keep early adopters satisfied. One easy way to lose customers is to provide an unreliable service.

Temporal operates with a “durable execution” model, meaning it guarantees all programs execute to completion, even when failures happen. It accomplishes this by autosaving state at every step in the system, so processes can pick up where they left off in the event of a machine failure, an API timeout, a plugged up queue, and so on.

Companies we spoke with reported “as close to 100% reliability as possible” since adopting Temporal, and other stats like 50% reduced downtime.

3. Build distributed systems without having distributed systems expertise.

Designing and building distributed systems with a small engineering team can be a challenge, especially if not everyone has experience with it. One or two experts on the team end up teaching everyone else, and the other developers spend their time learning instead of building.

Because Temporal abstracts away and automatically handles distributed system complexities like durability and availability, the startups we spoke to were able to hire developers with less experience and operate with leaner teams. Developers are able to code with Temporal in the programming language they already know (Go, Java, Typescript, Python, PHP, and .NET), instead of learning a new one. They also gain visibility in the state of their entire system and can access that information from the UI.

4. Set up systems for scale without sacrificing agility.

At a startup, you often need to make design compromises to deliver your MVP more quickly. That can result in accruing technical debt during feature development, especially related to reliability or performance. The system works well for the time being, but when you grow and reach product-market fit, things can start to go wrong. Your on-call engineers are burdened with manually intervening to resolve production issues that could be prevented with reliability built into the system.

Temporal lets you set up your systems for scale from the start, so you don’t need to redesign in the future. It scales out horizontally to handle millions of concurrent processes; our largest customers operate at internet scale. As a result, the customers we spoke to didn’t have to take time and effort to deal with reliability issues or redesigning, and instead could focus on building new features to win even more customers.

5. Get advice about what’s worked well for other startups and how to optimize systems.

Finally, startups have appreciated the access to our services team, which comes with a Temporal Cloud subscription. Our services team is staffed with engineers who have extensive experience with distributed systems. They can provide code reviews, pre-production checks, and more. Their knowledge has helped our startup customers learn what’s worked well for other similar use cases, and ultimately build more effective applications.

If you’re part of a startup and want to experience the benefits your peers have gained from Temporal Cloud, you can request $2,400 in free Temporal Cloud credits.

If you have any questions, you can take a look at our Temporal Cloud for Startups FAQs on this page or contact us at incubator@temporal.io. We’d love to hear from you!

And finally, to hear how Nuon, an infrastructure startup, is building with Temporal, check out this webinar.