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Engine · launching 16 October 2026
One platform for running communities at scale. Open source at its core, enterprise grade throughout, and the foundation for two deployments: Junction for technical communities and Switchboard for the third sector. Engine and Junction launch on 16 October 2026.
This isn't another event platform. It's the layer everything else is built on.
The architecture
Junction and Switchboard are Engine configured for two very different markets, running the same code, the same standards and the same data model.
Engine
The platform. Open source core, enterprise grade.
Junction
Engine deployed for technical communities and events
Switchboard
Engine deployed for the third sector, with a service layer on top
The one rule
A feature goes into Engine only if both deployments need it. If only one needs it, it lives in that deployment. That constraint is what stops one platform quietly becoming two products sharing a name.
Why we're building this
The power of communities
Technical communities 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 they create.
Fragmented infrastructure
Organisers duct-tape five, six, seven disconnected tools together, paying more each year for less, locked into platforms that reprice without warning, with no real ownership of their data.
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 other tools to operate. Eventbrite's $500 million sale to Bending Spoons consolidated legacy infrastructure further.
Our response
Switching tools doesn't fix fragmentation. It relocates it. Building another SaaS product doesn't 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 shouldn't be rented on someone else's terms.
“This isn't an incremental product release. It's a structural intervention into a broken market. We're building the system communities should have had from the start. Not tools. Infrastructure.”
Capabilities
Pick a capability to see everything it does.
01
Governance and operations for a single meetup or a portfolio of 200 chapters, including organiser succession and handover — the single biggest failure mode in community software.
Foundation services
Every deployment inherits these. They're the hard dependencies underneath every capability above.
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.
The discovery layer
Communities don't exist in isolation. The directories make those connections structural rather than accidental. Free to browse, free to list, with one claim, verification, moderation and deduplication model behind all four.
Communities
Topic, location, format, cadence, accessibility and size.
Register your communitySpeakers
Topics, past talks, formats, availability, travel radius, access requirements and languages.
Join as a speakerVenues
Capacity, layout, AV, accessibility detail, catering, cost and transport.
Register a venueEcosystem partners
Type, sectors, activation history, budget cycle and values alignment.
Register as a partnerSwitchboard runs the same architecture for organisations, services and funders.
Open source
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, with no fee. We make money from the enterprise edition and the deployments, not from holding your data hostage.
| Edition | Who it's 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 |
All prices exclude VAT.
Built for enterprise
The same platform running a 500-person external conference runs a 10,000-engineer internal guild programme.
Commitments
Accessibility on both surfaces
WCAG 2.2 AA across the attendee experience and the admin experience. Organisers have access needs too.
No take rate
Payments run through your own Stripe connected account. We don't 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, scanning and point of sale work when the venue's wifi doesn't.
Performance as a gate, not a hope
Core Web Vitals budgets enforced in CI, with performance gates on every microsite.
Comparison
Moving from Meetup, Bevy, Luma or Eventbrite? Our migration adapters bring members, events and history across.
| Feature | Meetup | Luma | Eventbrite | Bevy | Engine |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Community ownership | — | — | — | — | Yes |
| Event management | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Speaker management & CFP | — | — | — | — | Yes |
| Speaker payments | — | — | — | — | Yes |
| Sponsorship engine | — | — | — | — | Yes |
| Branded microsites | — | — | — | Yes | Yes |
| Membership & monetisation | — | — | — | — | Yes |
| Advanced analytics | — | — | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Full API & webhooks | — | — | — | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-community support | — | — | — | Yes | Yes |
| Internal guild infrastructure | — | — | — | — | Yes |
| Open source core | — | — | — | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted & on-premise | — | — | — | — | Yes |
| Full data export, no fee | — | — | — | — | Yes |
| WCAG 2.2 AA admin surface | — | — | — | — | Yes |
| Discovery directories | — | — | — | — | Yes |
Roadmap
16 October 2026
NextLaunch
Q4 2026
Open Source Release
2027
Global Infrastructure
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The infrastructure communities deserve.
Technical communities aren't side projects. Charities aren't amateurs with websites. They're the knowledge networks, career pathways and support systems people and industries depend on. Engine treats them that way.