Launching 7 September 2026
Engine
The platform underneath community infrastructure.
Engine is a single, unified platform for running communities at scale. Open source at its core, enterprise grade throughout, and already running two live deployments: Junction for technical communities and Switchboard for the third sector.
This is not another event platform. This is the layer everything else is built on.
The Architecture
One platform. Two deployments. No forks.
Engine is where everything is built. Junction and Switchboard are Engine configured for two very different markets, running the same code, the same standards and the same data model.
| What it is | Who runs it | Commercial model | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engine | The platform. Open source core, enterprise grade. | Us, anyone self hosting, and enterprises | Free, or enterprise licence |
| Junction | Engine deployed for technical communities and events | Us, and any technical community that subscribes | SaaS subscription |
| Switchboard | Engine deployed for the third sector, with a service layer on top | Us | Freemium and funder programmes |
One rule governs the whole codebase: a feature goes into Engine only if both deployments need it. If only one needs it, it lives in that deployment. That single constraint is what stops one platform quietly becoming two products sharing a name.
Why We're Building This
The community platform market is broken. We're rebuilding it from the foundation up.
The Power of Communities
Technical communities are among the most powerful forces in the global engineering economy. They drive knowledge transfer, shape careers, accelerate adoption and build the trust networks the industry runs on. Billions of pounds of enterprise value flows through the ecosystems communities create.
Fragmented Infrastructure
Organisers are duct-taping five, six, seven disconnected tools together, paying more each year for less capability, locked into platforms that reprice without warning, with no real ownership of their data and no path to sustainability.
Rising Costs, Declining Value
Our own platform costs rose from $100 to over $7,500 a year on Meetup alone, and we still needed a stack of additional tools just to operate. Bending Spoons' $500 million acquisition of Eventbrite has consolidated legacy infrastructure further under extraction rather than innovation.
Our Response
Switching tools does not fix fragmentation. It relocates it. Building another SaaS product does not fix ownership, it just changes the landlord. Engine is open source at the core, self hostable, exportable and licensed Apache 2.0, because infrastructure this important should not be something you rent on someone else's terms.
"This is not an incremental product release. This is a structural intervention into a broken market. We are building the system communities should have had from the start. Not tools. Infrastructure."
Ethan Sumner
Founder & CEO
Foundation Services
The part nobody markets and everybody needs.
Every deployment inherits these. They are the hard dependencies underneath every capability above them.
Multi-tenancy & Hierarchy
Tenant, organisation, community, chapter, event, session. Regional grouping with delegated administration, cross-tenant isolation, tenant-level feature flags.
Identity & Authentication
Passkeys, magic links, OAuth, SAML 2.0, OIDC, SCIM provisioning, two factor, full session and device control. One person, one identity across every community in a deployment.
Roles & Permissions
Composable scopes rather than fixed roles, inheritance down the hierarchy with explicit override, delegated administration and approval workflows for publishing, confirming and committing spend.
The Vocabulary Layer
Terms, theming, navigation and field configuration per deployment and per tenant. Sponsor becomes funder. Chapter becomes branch. Attendee becomes participant. This is what makes two very different products from one codebase possible.
Audit & Compliance
Immutable append-only audit log on every mutation with before and after diffs. Consent records, GDPR subject access and erasure with cascade rules, retention policies, data residency selection, SIEM streaming.
Notifications, Media, Search & Jobs
Multi-channel notifications with a preference centre. Media with virus scanning, CDN delivery and alt text enforced at upload. Full-text, faceted and geospatial search. A job queue with retries, idempotency and dead letter handling.
Capabilities
Nine integrated capabilities. One unified system.
Click any capability to explore the full feature set.
The Discovery Layer
Four directories. One trusted ecosystem.
Communities do not exist in isolation. The directories make those connections structural rather than accidental. Free to browse, free to list, with a shared claim, verification, moderation and deduplication model behind all four.
Speakers
Topics, past talks, formats, availability, travel radius, access requirements, languages.
Join as a Speaker →Venues
Capacity, layout, AV, accessibility detail, catering, cost, transport.
Register as a Venue →Ecosystem Partners
Type, sectors, activation history, budget cycle, values alignment.
Register as a Partner →Switchboard runs the same architecture for organisations, services and funders.
Open Source
Apache 2.0. Published governance. Public roadmap.
The core of Engine is free and open source. Self host it, fork it, run it forever without paying us anything. Full data export in JSON and CSV covering every entity, self service, no fee and no support ticket. Contribution guide and public roadmap from day one.
We make money from the enterprise edition and from the deployments, not from holding your data hostage.
| Edition | Who it is for | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Core | Any community or organisation, self hosted, Apache 2.0 | Free |
| Enterprise | Corporate guilds, DevRel, event businesses. SSO, self host or on premise, white label, compliance, SLA | From £8,000/yr |
| Directory API | Programmatic access to the four directories | £2,400/yr |
| Market Intelligence | Vendor marketing, sales and recruitment teams | £6,000/yr |
All prices exclude VAT.
Built for Enterprise
Enterprise infrastructure that happens to be excellent at communities.
Engine is not a community tool that enterprises can adapt. It is enterprise infrastructure built from the ground up. The same platform running a 500-person external conference runs a 10,000-engineer internal guild programme.
Multi-chapter management with centralised governance and regional autonomy
Internal guild and community of practice infrastructure
Centre of excellence governance
Champions programme tracking with participation data
Cross-team and cross-region coordination
Managed cloud, self hosted, on premise and air gapped deployment
Full white labelling including mobile app shell
SSO, SAML, OIDC and SCIM
Role-based access with complete audit logging
Data residency, configurable retention and legal hold
Penetration testing programme and SOC 2 pathway
Dedicated environments, SLA, named support and custom development
Commitments
What we commit to
Accessibility, both surfaces
WCAG 2.2 AA across the attendee experience and the admin experience. Organisers have access needs too, and no competitor treats it that way.
No take rate
Payments run through your own Stripe connected account. We do not sit in the middle of your revenue.
Your data, always
Full export of every entity, self service, at any time. JSON and CSV. No support ticket. No fee.
Offline where it matters
Check-in, scanner and point of sale work when the venue's wifi does not.
Performance as a gate, not a hope
Core Web Vitals budgets enforced in CI, with performance gates on every microsite.
Comparison
How Engine compares
| Feature | Meetup | Luma | Eventbrite | Bevy | Engine |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Community ownership | |||||
| Event management | |||||
| Speaker management & CFP | |||||
| Speaker payments | |||||
| Sponsorship engine | |||||
| Branded microsites | |||||
| Membership & monetisation | |||||
| Advanced analytics | |||||
| Full API & webhooks | |||||
| Multi-community support | |||||
| Internal guild infrastructure | |||||
| Open source core | |||||
| Self-hosted & on-premise | |||||
| Full data export, no fee | |||||
| WCAG 2.2 AA admin surface | |||||
| Discovery directories |
Roadmap
What's coming next
Engine launches on 7 September 2026. This is what the roadmap looks like beyond that.
Launch
- Engine launches 7 September 2026, alongside Junction
- Full public availability
- Expanded sponsor attribution and ROI tooling
Open Source Release
- Apache 2.0 core published with governance model
- Contribution guide and public roadmap from day one
- Community health scoring and automated re-engagement
- Analytics v2
Global Infrastructure
- Native mobile apps for organisers and attendees
- Enterprise white label at scale
- Global directory expansion
- Partner API ecosystem for third-party builders
- Multi-language support
- Impact intelligence for funders and regional bodies
Stay Updated
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The Infrastructure Communities Deserve
Technical communities are not side projects.
Charities are not amateurs with websites. They are the knowledge networks, career pathways and support systems that people and industries depend on.
Engine is the infrastructure that treats them that way.
Launching 7 September 2026 · Early access open now · Limited onboarding to ensure quality implementations