Your data, your exit. In writing.
In 2025 and 2026, indie developers watched trusted backends gut their free tiers, get acquired, and switch off - sometimes with a few weeks' notice, sometimes breaking games that had already shipped. Choosing a backend now means asking one more question: can this thing strand me?
This page is our answer. It is deliberately concrete, because vague reassurance is exactly what those platforms offered right up until they didn't.
Free forever, every feature
The Dev tier is free forever - 10,000 MAU, unlimited projects, and every feature unlocked. No feature is paywalled to force an upgrade, there is no credit card, and your project is never auto-paused. If you go over the free limit we slow new requests instead of switching you off.
Full data export, any time
Everything you store in Crux is readable through the same open API you build with - every player, save document, leaderboard entry, economy balance, and config bundle. Plain HTTP + JSON, no proprietary export format, nothing held back on the free tier. Your data is portable from the first call.
No lock-in by design
The SDKs and full API are open source on GitHub, so the code your game talks to is not a black box - every endpoint is documented and you can rebuild a client any time. Documents are your JSON, leaderboards are standard rows, and you can export all of it whenever you want. Self-hosting the backend stack is on the roadmap - not shipping today.
A written no-strand commitment
If Crux ever winds down, we commit to advance notice and a clearly communicated export window during which the API stays available for you to pull your data and migrate. We will not flip a switch and leave shipped games broken. That is the failure mode this whole page exists to rule out.
The API is the export tool.
There is no separate "export" product to wait for, because every record is already reachable with an authenticated GET. A migration script is a loop over these:
- Players - list every player in a project and read all of their documents.
- Save data - player-scoped and project-scoped JSON documents, exactly as you wrote them.
- Leaderboards - every board and its entries, with ranks and scores.
- Economy - currencies, virtual items, and per-player balances and inventory.
- Live config - your versioned config bundles, downloadable as files.
- Audit log - the record of administrative changes on your project.
Same credentials, same JSON, no lock-in. See the SDK quickstart for the exact routes.
Build on a backend you can walk away from.
Free forever on the Dev tier - 10,000 MAU, every feature, no credit card, and your data portable from day one.