Why We Started Building
I was an architect working with event-driven systems, and I hit a wall that many of you will recognise. Our events had become a free-for-all. Finding what existed, who owned it, what it contained, and how everything connected was painful.
Documentation was scattered across Confluence pages, README files, diagrams, schema registries, and tribal knowledge locked in people's heads. I needed something designed specifically for finding and understanding architecture at scale. So I built it.
What started as a simple catalog of events has grown into something much bigger. With incredible community support, EventCatalog now helps teams document domains, systems, services, schemas, ownership, diagrams, and the relationships between them. It's becoming the architecture documentation tool I wished existed.
Why We're Bootstrapped
EventCatalog is fully bootstrapped. No VC money, no outside investors telling us what to prioritise.
This is intentional. With venture capital comes top-down pressure: aggressive growth targets, arbitrary revenue milestones, and often a focus on the wrong things. The roadmap becomes about what investors want, not what users need.
By staying bootstrapped, we keep our destiny in our own hands. We can build the team we want to build, focus on the product we want to create, and make decisions based on one thing: what's best for the people actually using EventCatalog.
The only influence we want is from our users, customers, and community.
Why We're Open Source (Forever)
EventCatalog will always be open source. This isn't a marketing strategy - it's a core belief.
I'm a true believer in the open source ethos. There's something powerful about building in the open, letting anyone inspect the code, contribute ideas, and shape the direction of the project. It keeps us honest and accountable.
Open source also means you're never locked in. Your architecture documentation belongs to you. You can self-host, fork, extend, and integrate however you need. We think that's how software should be.
Where We Are Today
Since that Christmas in 2022, EventCatalog has grown beyond what I imagined:
- 40,000+ catalogs created worldwide
- 2,800+ GitHub stars from the community
- Enterprise customers in healthcare, banking, and transport
- Teams of all sizes using it to document their architectures
Companies like Nike, AWS, GOV.UK, M&S, Eurostar, and many others trust EventCatalog to document their systems. That's humbling and motivating in equal measure.
Where We're Going
My vision is for EventCatalog to become the open source documentation tool for software architecture.
That means going beyond events. Teams need to describe their domains, systems, services, messages, schemas, owners, flows, decisions, and diagrams in one place, using primitives that match how architects and engineers already think.
We're building for humans and AI. EventCatalog is not just a set of pages; it is a graph of your architecture. That graph gives people and AI agents the context they need to understand real software systems, reason about change, and keep documentation connected to code.
Architecture documentation should be living, useful, and trusted. With the right model, the right tools, and the right community, we can make it better for everyone.
Our Values
Open & Honest. Open source isn't just our license - it's how we operate. Transparent about our roadmap, honest about our limitations.
Community First. Everyone should feel welcome. We listen to feedback, prioritise based on real needs, and build together.
Have Fun. Documentation can be a slog. We're trying to change that. Building should be enjoyable - for us and for you.
User-Driven. No investor roadmaps. Features come from the people actually using EventCatalog every day.
A Note to You
If you're reading this, you've probably felt the same pain I felt. Your architecture is growing faster than your documentation. Systems, services, events, schemas, diagrams, and ownership are scattered everywhere. New team members take weeks to understand how things connect.
It doesn't feel like a big problem at first. But as your architecture scales, your documentation doesn't. That gap only gets wider.
EventCatalog exists to close that gap. To give your architecture a single source of truth that's actually designed for the job: not a generic wiki, not a folder of stale diagrams, and not a repurposed tool that almost works.
Thank you for being here. Whether you're evaluating EventCatalog, already using it, or just curious - I appreciate you taking the time to learn about what we're building and why.
— Dave Boyne
Creator & Founder, EventCatalog
About Dave: 20 years in startups and enterprises. Former developer advocate for serverless and architecture. From a small place in the UK. When not building EventCatalog, you'll find me playing guitar and experimenting with new ideas. What drives me is helping people through code - and seeing that feedback loop where the product gets better because of you.
