Kirak started inside a small team that built software for other people. Every new project began the same way: wire up authentication, write the CRUD endpoints, bolt on row-level checks, integrate a payment provider, add file uploads, set up a job scheduler. Different product, same backend plumbing — rebuilt, retested, and re-secured from scratch every time.
So in 2024 we stopped rebuilding it. We took the parts that never really changed — the CRUD machinery, the auth flows, the access rules, the integrations — and moved them into a single runtime that reads a declaration and serves all of it generically. Internally it was called Crux. The only code we wrote per project after that was the logic genuinely unique to the app: a handful of lifecycle hooks and custom endpoints.
We ran it in production across roughly a dozen real projects over about a year before deciding it shouldn't be ours alone. Every vibe-coded app hits the same wall — insecure, bloated, expensive-to-fix backends — rebuilding exactly what we'd already solved. Kirak is that runtime, released as genuine open source: no restriction on how you use it, including running it as a competing hosted service.
The company runs a managed service, Kirak Studio, on top of the same runtime — that's how the project is funded. Studio's hosting, build agent, and operating console are separate proprietary code; none of it is in this repository, and the runtime never depends on it.
