Kinde

Kinde is an Australian-born company that provides essential infrastructure for SaaS businesses, offering authentication tools, billing platforms, and feature flagging to secure, monetize, and manage modern web applications. The platform aims to accelerate product development by handling core infrastructure needs, serving over 55,000 businesses, which collectively represent 2 million individual users, and experiencing 20% monthly user growth. Kinde has secured A$10.6 million in seed funding from investors including Blackbird Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Didier Elzinga, and Benjamin Humphrey. Operating on a freemium model, the company provides free access for businesses up to 10,500 users and maintains a team of approximately 30 employees. Its billing platform is slated for an early 2025 launch. Kinde was founded in 2021 by Ross Chaldecott and Evgeny Komarevtsev.

High-Level Overview

Kinde is an Australian-born developer platform that provides authentication, access management, billing, and feature management tools to help SaaS founders build, secure, and monetize products from day one.[1][4][7] It serves SaaS teams, product builders, and engineers by solving infrastructure challenges like user auth (password and passwordless), roles/permissions, workflows, and entitlements, allowing them to focus on core product value rather than backend plumbing.[2][4][6] With over 70,000 developers trusting it and a free tier for early-stage founders, Kinde drives growth momentum through extensible APIs, SDKs in 20+ frameworks, and a mission to accelerate SaaS development for a "world with more founders."[1][4][5][7]

Origin Story

Kinde was co-founded by Ross Chaldecott, a tech entrepreneur with over 10 years in startups, alongside other founders and engineers who experienced SaaS infrastructure pain firsthand.[5] The idea emerged from their realization that building SaaS companies is "fucking hard," particularly due to fragmented tools for auth, billing, and features—problems they faced while starting their own ventures.[2][5] As a team building for themselves first, they launched with a vision for a unified platform, raised a significant seed round (backed by firms like Blackbird VC) to fuel expansion, and grew to serve a global community from hubs in Sydney and London.[1][5][6] Early traction came from their authentic focus on founder needs, evolving from auth tools to a full dev-acceleration suite.[2][7]

Core Differentiators

• Customer-first philosophy: Prioritizes building tools that grow customers' businesses over short-term revenue, with decisions rooted in "customers first, revenues second" and a free plan for bootstrappers.[1][2][4]
• All-in-one infrastructure: Combines auth (password/passwordless), user management, feature flags, billing/entitlements, and workflows in one extensible platform with APIs, webhooks, and 20+ SDKs for rapid integration.[4][6][7]
• Founder-built authenticity: Created by ex-founders/engineers who use it daily, ensuring deep problem understanding and a bias toward long-term impact over hype.[2][5]
• Developer-centric experience: Emphasizes speed, extensibility (e.g., future marketplace), transparency in pricing (usage-based, scales with growth), and community via Discord/Slack.[1][2][4][7]

(Note: A separate mental health social network at wearekinde.com shares the name but is unrelated to this SaaS platform.[3])

Role in the Broader Tech Landscape

Kinde rides the SaaS infrastructure consolidation trend, where founders seek unified platforms to replace multi-vendor sprawl amid rising complexity in auth, monetization, and scaling.[2][4][7] Timing is ideal as SaaS matures—post-2020 boom, with developers demanding "dev-acceleration" tools that cut setup time from weeks to minutes, fueled by remote/global teams and AI-driven product builds.[1][5] Market forces like transparent pricing and free tiers lower barriers for indie hackers, while extensibility positions it against giants like Auth0/Stripe by enabling custom ecosystems.[2][4] It influences the ecosystem by empowering more founders (its core mission), fostering abundance through tools that "let people make insanely great things," and reducing churn in early-stage SaaS.[1][2][5]

Quick Take & Future Outlook

Kinde is poised to expand its "single platform" vision with deeper marketplace integrations, advanced automations, and global scaling from its seed momentum.[2][5][7] Trends like passwordless auth mandates, usage-based billing, and AI-assisted dev tools will amplify its edge, potentially capturing share in the $10B+ auth/billing market. Its influence may evolve from niche SaaS enabler to category leader, creating that "world with more founders" by making infrastructure invisible—tying back to its origin as a kindness to overworked builders.[1][5]