5 Functions, 1 Route, $0/Month: My Entire SaaS Background Job Architecture

BullMQ needs Redis. Cron has no retries. I needed background jobs that can sleep for 48 hours, fan out to parallel workers, and survive server restarts — without paying for infrastructure I don't have users to justify yet. I replaced the entire Redis + BullMQ + cron + monitoring stack with five Inngest functions. Total cost: $0. AI as a Solo Founder's Tool A 5-part email series on using AI as more than a search engine — for building, marketing, and shipping alone. drippery.app The Full Picture Drippery — my drip email SaaS — runs five background functions. Together they cover scheduled email delivery, DNS domain verification polling, orphaned file cleanup, and beta user lifecycle. All five are registered in one Next.js API route. Inngest calls it via webhook. No Redis, no worker process, no cron container. Here's what that replaces: Without Inngest With Inngest Redis instance (~$10/month on Render) Nothing BullMQ worker process Nothing Cron container or external service Nothing Manual