From Renting the Backend to Owning It: How Dibyajyoti’s Concile Is Handing Realtime Infrastructure Back to Developers”

There is a quiet shift happening in how developers think about the backend, and at the center of it stands Dibyajyoti Panda, the founder and product head behind Concile, an Indian-built, open-source, self-hosted backend-as-a-service developed in Bengaluru, India.

Ask any developer who has tried to add live updates to an app and you will hear the same story. What starts as a simple feature, a chat that refreshes itself, a dashboard that moves on its own, turns into Postgres, Redis, a websocket layer, and a cache invalidation bug nobody can reproduce. The alternative is a managed cloud backend that works beautifully until the bill arrives, because the platform owns your write path and rents it back to you as you grow. Dibyajyoti asks a fundamentally different question: why should any of this belong to someone else’s cloud?

The Frustration That Started It All

Concile did not begin in a boardroom. It began with the tax every developer pays the moment an app needs to feel alive. For builders evaluating an open-source Firebase alternative or a self-hosted Supabase alternative, the trade-off was familiar: managed services were fast to start and slow to leave, while self-hosted stacks demanded a team to run them. Nothing in between respected the builder who wanted their own infrastructure without staffing it.

So Dibyajyoti built the thing he wanted: an open-source realtime backend with a database, reactive queries, auth, cron jobs, file storage and a live dashboard, packed into a single binary that anyone can run. One install command, npm i concile, and an empty folder becomes a live app.

What Is Concile?

At its core, Concile is built on one belief: a developer should describe their data and their logic, and the infrastructure should disappear. It delivers that through three pillars.

1. Live queries, not change feeds – Most backends stream raw row events and leave the client to figure out whether a new row belongs in a filtered, sorted, paginated view, which means writing a query engine twice. Concile subscribes to the query itself. It records what every query touched, and pushes a new result only when a write actually changes the answer. No polling, no websocket code, no refresh button.
2. The whole backend in one binary – This single binary backend runs queries and mutations as TypeScript functions on the server. Auth, scheduling, durable jobs and file storage are built in, not bolted on. A live dashboard runs on the same origin as the app, so you watch writes land in the database as they happen.
3. Ownership, end to end – There is no Concile cloud. The same code runs in development, in a single container, and as a static binary on a five-dollar VPS. Data lives on your own disk in an embedded SQLite file by default, or in your own Postgres and S3-compatible storage when you scale. You own the write path, the data and the bill.

Measured, Not Marketed

In a space full of promises, Concile ships numbers. Its benchmark suite, committed to the public repository for anyone to reproduce, shows a single one-vCPU, 512MB container serving 2,000 live reactive subscribers at roughly 12 percent CPU, with a median hot-push latency of about 102 milliseconds and around 21KB of memory per connection. A single node has been measured clean at 10,000 subscribers.

The project is fully open source and written in TypeScript, with more than 1,200 commits behind it. For builders looking for a Convex alternative, it offers a familiar reactive model without tying the write path to a vendor cloud.

The Message That Is Resonating

“Most teams do not have a backend problem,” Dibyajyoti says. “They have an ownership problem. They are renting the most important part of their product from someone else, and they feel it every time the invoice grows faster than the business.”

That message is landing with the builders who care most: the self-hosters, the open-source community, and the founders who want Convex-style reactive views on infrastructure they control. From indie hackers running a single VPS to teams who cannot put their data in someone else’s cloud, developers are picking up Concile and shipping realtime apps that stay theirs.

“Your backend should be something you own,” he says, “not something you rent.”