MIT, all the way down
Cloud and self-hosted are the same code. No open-core bait, no features clawed back into an enterprise tier. If we disappeared tomorrow, you'd keep running.
The GraphQL company enterprises build on.
The Guild is the engine behind open-source GraphQL. Profitable and bootstrapped for over 10 years.
We build Hive, the open-source GraphQL Federation platform (schema registry, router, and observability), and Stellate, the CDN and cache for GraphQL. Learn more →
~/the-guild/why
Built for trust, structured for the long term. And you can verify all of it.
Most infrastructure vendors ask you to trust their intentions. We've structured the whole company from the beginning so you don't have to: the license, the finances, and the track record each remove a category of risk on their own.
learn more ↗
Profitable, bootstrapped
Stable finances, zero venture capital. Profitable enough to acquire Stellate (2024) and Grafbase (2026) from cash flow, not from a raise.
Adopt one piece, or the whole platform
The opposite of lock-in: Hive Console and Hive Router each work standalone. Run just the schema registry with the gateway you already have, or just the router with your existing registry, then migrate the rest gradually, only what you want, when you want.
~/the-guild/history
With GraphQL from day one. Still here. Still shipping.
Vendors show you roadmaps; we'd rather show you history. The pattern to notice: when others left the ecosystem, we stayed and took over the maintenance, four times now.
2015
GraphQL goes public, and we're already in
Building and contributing from the ecosystem's first year. Not tourists who arrived when it got popular.
2016
GraphQL Codegen ships maintained 10+ years
Type-safe GraphQL for millions of developers. A decade of continuous releases, the longest-maintained tool of its kind in the ecosystem.
2020
GraphQL-Tools, adopted from Apollo alive & growing
When Apollo stepped back, we took over the most-depended-on schema library in GraphQL and kept every user shipping.
2021
GraphQL Yoga, adopted from Prisma alive & growing
Prisma moved on; we rebuilt Yoga into the fully-featured, spec-compliant GraphQL server it is today.
2022
Launched Hive platform flagship
The GraphQL federation platform: schema registry, observability, and gateway. MIT-licensed from day one, and fully self-hostable by the end of the year.
2024
Stellate acquired, product saved alive & growing
The CDN for GraphQL joined The Guild. Customers kept their edge, the product kept its roadmap.
2026
Grafbase acquired, users migrated merged into Hive
Second acquisition funded from profit, not funding.
~/the-guild/platform
Hive runs your federation. Stellate makes it fast everywhere.
One open-source platform for the whole GraphQL lifecycle (schema registry, gateway, and observability), with a global edge in front of it. Adopt each piece independently; they're better together.
open-source GraphQL federation platform
Schema registry, gateway, and observability in one MIT-licensed platform. Prevent breaking changes before they ship, watch every operation in production, and serve the supergraph from your clusters or ours.
Schema registry: composition checks against live traffic and persisted operations, so a breaking change is caught in CI, not by a customer.
Hive Router: open-source (MIT) federation router built in Rust; the fastest gateway in public benchmarks, verified by a reproducible federation audit.
Observability: per-operation, per-client usage analytics; know exactly who depends on every field before you touch it.
Enterprise controls: SSO, RBAC, audit logs, self-hosting, schema policies.
the CDN for GraphQL
GraphQL-aware edge caching and protection, in front of any GraphQL API, including the ones Hive doesn't run. Acquired by The Guild in 2024, actively developed since.
Edge caching: GraphQL-aware invalidation at the CDN layer; serve reads from the edge, pass mutations through and invalidate precisely.
Protection: rate limiting, query-depth and complexity limits, and persisted-operation enforcement at the perimeter.
Insight: see cache hit rates and origin load per operation, per client.
Independent: works with Apollo, Yoga, Hive, or any spec-compliant GraphQL server.
also part of our graphql ecosystem:
~/the-guild/proof
In production, at scale, on the record.
Public case studies with named companies, not anonymized "a leading enterprise" slides.
Hemnet moved from Apollo Router to Hive Gateway expecting a performance cost, and measured it running at less than 30% of Apollo Router's resource usage.
"Hive empowers us to confidently evolve our schemas by ensuring seamless API updates, detecting potential breaking changes, and guiding developers."
Running on Hive
Reverb
Music
A decade-old GraphQL monolith migrated to a federated supergraph on Hive Gateway, query by query.
Buffer
Social media
Planning, publishing, and analytics across 10+ networks, all on Hive.
Trivago
Travel
One GraphQL gateway unifying data access across internal services at scale.
Hemnet
Real estate
Apollo Router → Hive Gateway, at under 30% of the resource usage.
Wealthsimple
Finance
GraphQL with Hive as the central API management layer for a growing fintech.
Sound.xyz
Music
750M+ requests a month; hours of schema archaeology reduced to minutes.
On Stellate's edge
THAT Conference
Events
40× faster GraphQL; database reads down 96%.
Italic
E-commerce
From Black Friday crashes to a Black Friday that just worked.
Patronage
Publishing
99% less traffic to their headless WordPress servers.
InnerSpace
Workplace analytics
Hasura p95 response times improved by 83%.
Drive
Automotive media
Australia's top automotive source cut API traffic while growing its audience.
Hashnode
Developer media
96% faster p50 responses and 93.7% less API traffic for 3M+ monthly readers.
~/the-guild/security
Your security review, pre-answered.
For procurement and security reviewers: the attestations, controls, and deployment options you'll ask about, each with a public source you can check before the first call.
SOC 2 Type II
Audited, continuously
SOC 2 Type II attested and listed in the Cloud Security Alliance STAR registry. Reports, policies, and subprocessors are published in the trust center, no NDA required to read them.
air-gap
Managed or self-hosted
Use the managed cloud, or run the entire platform on your own infrastructure, in your VPC or fully air-gapped. Same MIT-licensed code either way, not a stripped "enterprise edition."
Enterprise-ready
SSO · SCIM
SAML/OIDC single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, custom roles and permissions, and exportable audit logs. The controls your review checklist actually names.
Also: AI agents, when you're ready. The same supergraph that governs your GraphQL consumers extends to agents: skills declared in the schema, exposed over MCP, governed by the same checks. No new platform, no replatforming. It's there when you want it, and invisible until you do. learn more ↗
Get in touch.
Looking to work with The Guild, learn more about our products, or just validate your API strategy with us? We'll be happy to speak with you and learn about your efforts, for free. You'll be talking to the engineers who maintain the tools you already run, not an SDR.