GraphQL on Mighty

Build community features that feel just like your product.

Create your own frontend on a GraphQL backend that already handles memberships, payments, moderation, media, notifications, search, and AI. Your members can also use native iOS and Android apps powered by the same graph.

Why it works Compare the costs

api.mn.co/graphql

# Your UI, backed by Mighty — a real query
# against the published schema.
query CommunityHome {
  me { name avatarUrl }
  network {
    title
    posts(first: 20) {
      nodes {
        ... on Post { title cheerCount commentCount }
      }
    }
    events { title startsAt rsvpYesCount }
    courses(first: 3) { nodes { title url } }
  }
}

# Payments, permissions, push, search,
# transcoding, tax, and SOC 2 are already handled.

Try it out

capability areas available through the Headless API

SOC 2

Mighty's compliance program is already in effect

native apps your team does not have to build

backend on-call rotations for your team to staff

What you could build

Endless widget options, all straight off the graph.

Every card below is the kind of component a customer's team could ship in their own design system, on their own site or app. What powers each one is a GraphQL query — shown under the card — instead of a backend project. Flip any card (or hit Remix) to see the same query wearing a completely different design system: the graph doesn't care what your UI looks like. Names and numbers are samples.

Amara Reyes

Design Critique · 2h

We rebuilt our community home on the Headless API — same members and spaces, but now it finally looks like our product. 🎉

❤️ 24👏 128 comments

Posts & reactionsfeed { nodes { reactions } }

Foundations of Facilitation

17 of 25 lessons · 68%

✓Openers that actually work

17Reading the roomUp next

18Difficult conversations

Courscourses { progressPct }

Natalia Sousa

Active now

Welcome in! 👋 Your cohort kicks off Monday.

Just finished the intro course — can't wait.

Messagingchat { messages { body } }

Mar17

Weekday Live Coaching

10:00 AM · Live stream

JKLPMO+141 goingRSVP

ÉvénementsupcomingEvents { rsvpState }

Membres

1,284

Search members…

Noor Haddad

Host · Austin

Jonas Keller

Member · Berlin

Priya Nair

Moderator · Mumbai

Member directorymembers(first: 20)

Where should the spring meetup happen?

Lisbon38%

Austin27%

Stay online35%

214 votes · closes in 2 days

Pollspoll { options { votePct } }

Quick quiz: Reading the room

3 of 5

Best opener for a quiet cohort?

Start with the agenda

Run a two-minute icebreaker poll ✓

Wait for someone to speak up

Correct — 3 for 3 so far.

Quizzesquiz { questions { choices } }

Pro Membership

Your brand and member experience stay yours. Mighty handles what sits underneath.

Members notice the design, the brand, and the way the experience fits into the rest of your product. Mighty handles the platform work underneath, so your team can spend more time on what matters most to your members.

You build the frontend. Mighty runs the platform.

Own what members see. Mighty handles data storage, search, payments, media, email, and notifications behind the scenes.
Start with the basics already built. Members, Spaces, Posts, Comments, Events, Courses, Messaging, and Subscriptions are ready to use.
Start from the published schema. Introspect the SDL, generate types, and build against a documented API.

The work you avoid is mostly behind the scenes.

Feeds and read state. Ranking, unread counts, new-since-last-visit markers, member mutes, and notification grouping all need to stay in sync.
Permissions and entitlements. Every request has to respect the right plan, role, and paywall.
Realtime, search, and media. WebSocket fan-out, relevance ranking, transcoding, and adaptive-bitrate video each require specialized infrastructure.

In one lineBuild on top of a best-in-class community experience instead of another generic backend.

GraphQL vs. REST

AI-driven development? Check.

Don't paint yourself into a corner with legacy technology. Mighty is built from the ground up for the AI development era.

It's a whole new world...

No more need to map out dozens of REST routes. With GraphQL, an AI can introspect the schema and know exactly what queries and mutations are available, what types exist, and what is required versus optional.
Nested and related data comes back in one request, which is important when managing token cost.
Streamlined iframe embedding of custom OAuth apps across web, iOS, and Android. No more confusing double sign-ins for members or cross-domain cookie issues.
Ability to extend Network MCPs to members instead of only Hosts and admins. Our MCP server and GraphQL API are built on the same product surface, so MCP capabilities grow as the platform does.

What Mighty handles

Platform work that is easy to underestimate

These are the areas most likely to be left out of a build-versus-buy estimate. Each one adds implementation work, maintenance, and operational responsibility.

Money infrastructure

Payments quickly become a product, compliance, and support problem of their own.

Mighty supports subscriptions, plan changes, proration, trials, coupons, gifts, one-time purchases, payouts, and multiple currencies.
Dunning and failed-payment recovery. Recovering failed payments protects revenue that would otherwise disappear as involuntary churn.
Tax. Sales tax, VAT, and nexus rules need ongoing attention.
PCI scope stays on Mighty's side of the line, so your frontend does not touch card details.
Existing support tools cover chargebacks, refunds, and disputes.

In one lineLaunch paid memberships without building the billing system behind them.

You keep the native apps

A custom web experience does not mean giving up mobile or building two more products.

Your members can keep using iOS and Android alongside your custom web experience.
Your frontend and Mighty's native apps read from the same graph.
Mighty handles push delivery, app-store releases, review cycles, and OS updates.
Building and maintaining two native apps in-house requires a dedicated mobile team.

In one lineDesign the web experience you want and keep native mobile apps for your members.

Trust and compliance

Mighty already has controls and workflows that would take time and specialist work to build yourself.

Mighty already maintains a SOC 2 compliance program.
The platform includes GDPR and CCPA workflows, data-subject requests, deletion and export flows, DPAs, and sub-processor lists.
Mighty continues to invest in accessibility across its first-party web and native experiences.
Why it matters: enterprise and education buyers often require documented controls before a deal can move forward.

Scale, performance, and the operational tail

Infrastructure is only part of the cost. Someone also has to keep it running.

Mighty operates the CDN, caching layers, connection pools, autoscaling, read replicas, and queue backpressure.
On-call. A reliable service needs paging, runbooks, incident response, and follow-up work.
The platform team handles live-table migrations, zero-downtime deploys, and capacity planning ahead of launches.
Mighty already staffs the team that owns this work.

Deliverability

Deliverability is easy to overlook until messages stop reaching members.

Mighty handles transactional and digest email at volume, including sender reputation, warm IPs, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, bounces, and complaints.
Push delivery works across APNs and FCM, including token lifecycle management.
Digest batching and member preferences help prevent notification overload.
The practical risk: when community email lands in spam, the result can look like an engagement problem even when the content is good.

AI features without building the whole stack

Your team can add AI features without first creating a separate AI platform.

Cohost is an AI agent with tools that act on the graph.
People Magic provides matching and recommendations based on community data.
An MCP server makes a Network available to Claude and other compatible AI clients.
Semantic search and discovery embeddings are already in production.

In one lineUse Mighty's AI capabilities from the same graph that powers the rest of your experience.

Roadmap and flexibility

What happens as your product grows?

New API capabilities become available to your frontend, and you can decide how much of the experience to customize.

Your frontend benefits from Mighty's roadmap

When Mighty adds a capability to the graph, your team can use it without implementing the backend service.
With a custom backend, your team owns the implementation and maintenance of every new capability.
The API contract is documented. Mighty publishes the SDL and changelog, then announces deprecations before renaming or removing fields.
Existing queries continue to work during the deprecation period, giving your team time to update them.

Adopt headless at your own pace

Customize the surfaces that matter. You can build the member-facing home while keeping Mighty's admin, moderation, billing, and settings screens.
Use one graph across surfaces. Your web frontend, Mighty's native apps, automations, webhooks, and MCP use the same source of truth.
Connect your other systems. Webhooks and exports keep your community data accessible elsewhere.
You can start with Mighty's UI and add a custom frontend later, or use the Headless API from the beginning.

Cost comparison

Compare Mighty's price with the team and systems a custom backend requires.

The subscription covers work that would otherwise sit with engineering, operations, finance, and compliance. Every row below is priced at $100 an hour — the bottom of a fully loaded US senior-engineer rate — against build estimates that are deliberately optimistic. Your team's real numbers will be higher.

Capability	Build it yourself	On Mighty
Core backend and API	Dedicated backend engineers, ongoing2,000 h × $100 = $200k · two engineers, six months, best case	Included
iOS and Android	Dedicated mobile engineers, ongoing2,000 h × $100 = $200k · both platforms, six months, best case	Included
Infrastructure and on-call	Platform engineering and an on-call rotation700 h × $100 = $70k · to stand it up; the rotation never ends	Included
SOC 2	A compliance program and recurring audits600 h × $100 = $60k · plus $30–60k in audit fees, every year	Included
Payments, tax, dunning	Engineering and finance operations800 h × $100 = $80k · subscriptions, proration, tax, retries	Included
Email and push deliverability	Specialist ownership and ongoing monitoring500 h × $100 = $50k · plus ESP fees and reputation work	Included
AI features	AI infrastructure and product engineering700 h × $100 = $70k · plus model spend, per member, forever	Included
Optimistic cost to reach v1	7,300 hours ≈ $730kThree and a half engineer-years, at a rate you will not actually get, and it only buys the launch. Keeping it alive adds $110–150k a year on the standard 15–20% maintenance benchmark, before cloud, processor, and model spend.	Your Mighty subscription
Your custom frontend	Your team	Your team

Cost figures are illustrative estimates, not quotes. The $100/hour rate is the rounded-down floor of a fully loaded US senior-engineer cost: published base ranges of roughly $140–205k at the standard 1.25–1.4× loaded multiplier work out to $95–120 an hour. Hour estimates assume everything goes right and nothing is rebuilt. SOC 2 fees use published 2026 audit ranges; maintenance uses the Gartner/Forrester 15–20% of build cost benchmark.

Operational risk

A custom backend also changes what your team has to own.

What a custom backend adds to your risk register

Key-person risk. If one backend engineer holds the mental model for your entitlements logic, their departure leaves a serious knowledge gap.
Ongoing maintenance. Your team owns dependency vulnerabilities, framework upgrades, Stripe API versions, and OS changes for as long as the product runs.
Opportunity cost. Time spent on notification batching is time your team cannot spend improving the experience members came for.
Future migration risk. If a homegrown backend no longer fits, you have to replace it while real members and payments continue moving through the system.

Best fit

Confidently check the boxes for every scenario.

Different teams can choose the same platform for very different reasons.

Agencies and studios

Agencies can reuse a frontend across client work without standing up a new community backend for every engagement.

Faster delivery

SaaS adding community

SaaS teams can match their existing design system and keep community inside the existing product template.

Product continuity

Enterprise and education

Enterprise and education buyers often require SOC 2, SSO, and brand control during procurement.

Existing controls

Creators with an in-house team

Teams with an established brand can build the experience their designers want without accepting a standard template.

Creative control

Anyone with an existing site or app

Existing products can make community feel like a native feature instead of sending members to a separate experience.

One experience

Marketplaces and networks

Marketplaces and networks can add community as one part of a larger product without requiring a new template or style.

Flexible architecture

Where to start

3 Key Takeaways

Make the value of building on Mighty with GraphQL clear to stakeholders, without things getting too technical.

Custom UI

Full visual control

Your team can create fully custom experiences, entirely standalone or embedded right within Mighty's web, iOS, and Android apps.

GraphQL

Modern backend

Build on GraphQL and fully tap into the power and flexibility of AI-driven development.

Compliance

SOC 2 coverage

Mighty's existing compliance program addresses a requirement that often determines whether enterprise and education deals move forward.

Read the docs Explore the schemaNeed the raw SDL? Download it from api.mn.co/graphql/schema.graphql.