Problem

Fastgen addresses the time, cost, and technical friction involved in building backend infrastructure from scratch. Creating REST APIs, connecting third-party services, managing databases, handling hosting, and implementing recurring or event-driven business logic traditionally requires substantial engineering effort. The economic pain is primarily the opportunity cost of slow product launches and the labor spent on repetitive integration and infrastructure work rather than on differentiated product functionality.

Its clearest use case is helping teams rapidly build backends for MVPs and internal tools, while automating repetitive workflows for go-to-market, operations, and marketing teams. Fastgen’s founders describe the product as a response to the need to move faster and as a tool they wished they had while building their previous company.

Product / Service

Fastgen is a low-code API and workflow-building platform with an integrated Postgres database. Users construct REST APIs through a drag-and-drop interface, add native actions and integrations such as SendGrid, Slack, and Twilio, connect external APIs, and deploy flows without separately handling the underlying hosting work. They can use Fastgen’s hosted database or connect an existing Postgres database.

The platform also supports scheduled and event-triggered workflows, custom events that can launch other workflows, scalable APIs, background tasks, scheduled jobs, and user management. Its benefit is to compress backend development and automation into a visual, self-service workflow, allowing product, operations, and marketing teams to ship functional business logic faster and with less bespoke engineering.

Market

Fastgen competes in the low-code/no-code backend, API-builder, workflow-automation, and B2B developer-tools markets. The evidence explicitly identifies Hasura, 8base, Planet Crust, and ob1 by Outerbase as alternatives; adjacent products such as Xano and Supabase also address overlapping backend-building needs. Fastgen’s positioning is differentiated less by being a general front-end builder than by combining visual API construction, workflow automation, and database management in one backend-oriented product.

The company entered through Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch, reported current customers using it for MVPs, internal tools, and operational automation, and solicited users for a private beta. The available evidence does not establish verified revenue, user counts, or scaled customer traction, so the best characterization is early commercial traction rather than a demonstrably scaled business or definitively pre-revenue company. A December 2024 announcement says Lumos acquired Fastgen’s automation technology, which suggests that Fastgen’s standalone product or company status changed after the older YC profile labeled it active; the evidence supports an acquisition of technology, not necessarily the entire company.