New developers ship code on day one.

TDK sets up the entire technical workspace in minutes. No waiting, no setup weeks, no extra hires.

In plain words

Software companies lose weeks of salary every time they hire developers. The newcomers wait: computers are not set up, passwords are missing, instructions are outdated.

TDK sets up the entire technical workspace automatically, in minutes. New hires write code on day one. We sell it as a subscription at $19 per developer per month. See what waiting costs.

Watch a cold boot

This is the real boot sequence, captured on a 16 GB M1 MacBook. Discovery, generation, golden-layer caching, health checks — then you just write code.

4.6s from zero to a healthy 14-service demo stack — selective startup means new services add features, not boot time
zsh: tdk up

The unit economics, stated plainly

Conservative model: five engineering hours recovered per developer per week, plus one avoided platform hire.

How much will your company save?

Drag the sliders. The formula is printed below — no magic numbers.

Developers on the team 10
Average fully-loaded salary $130,000
2,400 engineering hours recovered / year
$150,000 productivity recovered / year
$300,000 total yearly savings incl. avoided DevOps hire

Math: devs × 5 hrs × 48 weeks × hourly rate (salary ÷ 2,080) + one avoided platform-engineer hire ($150K). TDK itself costs $0 — open source, MIT.

One manifest in. 12-17 files out.

Service output and stack contracts, both derived from the same service.json.

12-17 files generated per service, every time
40+ stack-wide artifacts: diagrams, identities, registries

One manifest

{
  "appName": "orders",
  "appType": "frontend",
  "port": 3001,
  "features": ["vite"]
}
Shipping containers representing 100+ microservices
100+ services proven running locally

A real toolchain, wired together — not a template dump

Every artifact below is produced by an actual generator module in the TDK source tree. See our ERP system with 100 services for a production example.

Docker L1–L4 golden layers Docker Compose ×8 variants Tilt + Starlark engine Vite (frontend / backend / SDK / library) TypeScript ×5 tsconfig variants nginx Traefik Verdaccio local registry Infisical machine identities Prisma + DB migrator Playwright E2E PostgreSQL NATS JetStream Bun .npmrc + .env per service C4 architecture diagrams AGENTS.md for AI assistants Discovery daemon + tdk doctor

Watch one manifest become a working service.

No more monolith-shaped AI output. TDK gives coding agents a legible topology, then keeps dozens of services independently owned, generated, and reachable through one local domain namespace.

tdk generate --service order-frontend
input / service.json 1 source
{
  "appName": "order-frontend",
  "appType": "frontend",
  "port": 3001,
  "features": ["vite", "typescript"],
  "backendName": "order-backend"
}
Reading the service contract
output / .autogenerated/ 0 / 17 files
  • .env.frontend.autogenerated
  • .npmrc.autogenerated
  • .npmrc.docker.autogenerated
  • AGENTS.md
  • Dockerfile.app.autogenerated
  • api-client.ts
  • api-index.ts
  • bunfig.autogenerated.toml
  • bunfig.docker.autogenerated.toml
  • env.ts
  • nginx.autogenerated.conf
  • playwright.config.autogenerated.ts
  • tsconfig.autogenerated.json
  • tsconfig.docker.autogenerated.json
  • validation-report.autogenerated.json
  • vite.config.build.autogenerated.ts
  • vite.config.frontend.autogenerated.ts
Stack contracts Tiltfile / TILT_TECH_STACK.star / dependency-manifest.json / docs/architecture.c4 / AGENTS.md

Every service is on the network in seconds.

It looks like weeks of integration. TDK launches the topology at once while Traefik handles discovery, health checks, retries, and paths.

14 services healthy in 4.6s Measured on a 16 GB M1 MacBook. Every route goes live as soon as its service passes health checks. *.commerce.localhost
Storefronthttp://app.commerce.localhost/store
Operationshttp://app.commerce.localhost/ops
Orders APIhttp://api.commerce.localhost/api/v1/orders
Inventory APIhttp://api.commerce.localhost/api/v1/inventory
Identity APIhttp://api.commerce.localhost/api/v1/identity
Payments APIhttp://api.commerce.localhost/api/v1/payments

One manifest replaces cloud sandboxes at $150 per developer, weeks of YAML plumbing, and a $150K platform hire.

Everything you stop paying for

Teams assemble this stack from a dozen tools and months of DevOps work. TDK ships it in one CLI — on hardware you already own.

Cloud dev environments

Gitpod / Ona, GitHub Codespaces, Coder, Daytona, Codeanywhere, Replit

$20–$150 /dev/mo $0 — your laptop's Docker

Kubernetes dev tooling

Garden, Skaffold, DevSpace, Telepresence, mirrord, Nocalhost — plus weeks of YAML

2–6 weeks DevOps one service.json

Golden Docker images

DIY base-image maintenance, CVE patching, cache strategy

ongoing burden L1–L4 layers included

Per-service build config

Hand-written Vite, TSConfig, Dockerfile, .npmrc and .env for every repo

repeated per service 12-17 files auto-generated

Secrets infrastructure

Vault / Infisical wiring, machine identities, token lifecycle per service

setup + audit time identities pre-wired

Routing, registry and docs

nginx / Traefik configs, private npm registry, architecture diagrams, runbooks

constant maintenance generated, cannot rot

E2E test infrastructure

Playwright environment setup against the full running stack

days per project built-in Playwright

Onboarding runbooks

Wiki pages that rot within a month — replaced by tdk doctor and a live terminal UI

1–3 days per hire tdk up — minutes

Honest answers

Hover to expand. The same answers we give in engineering reviews.

We need Kubernetes for production
Local dev doesn't need to match production. Use TDK for fast local iteration — a full boot in under 5 seconds — and K8s for prod when you're ready. Everything TDK generates is standard Docker and TypeScript tooling, so there is zero lock-in.
What about CI/CD?
TDK is completely decoupled from your CI. Use it for local development and whatever you want for CI/CD. Nothing to migrate away from later.
Should we fire our DevOps team?
No. TDK removes the local-environment babysitting — setup scripts, port conflicts, rotting onboarding docs. Your infrastructure people keep production and CI/CD; product engineers stop waiting on them. Teams without a DevOps hire can simply skip making one.
Is 100+ services locally realistic?
Yes — selective startup runs only what you're working on, and golden L1–L4 layers keep rebuilds near-instant. The discovery daemon regenerates only what changed. Our daily driver is a 14-service stack on a 16 GB M1 MacBook, and it performs superbly; the same engine runs a 27-service monorepo every day.
Where do the savings numbers come from?
Transparent math: 5 hours per dev per week recovered, salary ÷ 2,080 working hours, plus one avoided platform-engineer role ($150K/yr) or $500/dev/month in cloud sandboxes. Try the calculator above with your own numbers.

Priced against what it replaces

Free during beta. When we launch — simple pricing anchored to the alternatives, not to our costs.

Community
$0 / forever

The full CLI, MIT-licensed. Our adoption engine — the same model as Tilt and Skaffold.

  • Unlimited services, 100+ proven
  • All generators — 12-17 files per service
  • L1–L4 golden Docker images
  • Community support
Enterprise
Custom

For regulated or large-scale environments.

  • SSO / OIDC, audit logs
  • Air-gapped / on-prem support
  • SLA and dedicated Slack channel
  • Forward-deployed setup of your stack

Why $19? Because the alternatives cost 5–500× more.

vs cloud dev envs

Gitpod starts at $20/mo plus compute. Codespaces runs $60–150 per dev per month at full-time usage. TDK Team is $19 flat — compute is your laptop.

vs a DevOps hire

10 devs × $19 = $2,280/yr. One platform engineer costs $150K/yr. A 65× difference for the local-environment portion of the job.

vs lost hours

$19 is roughly 15 minutes of a fully-loaded developer's month. TDK returns about 20 hours. It typically pays for itself in the first week.

vs enterprise CDEs

Coder and Okteto gate RBAC and SSO behind "contact sales". TDK Team includes team policies at a self-serve price.

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