About LEADR

LEADR started from a simple observation: indie game developers were stuck between terrible options. Platform lock-in with Steam or console-specific solutions. Bloated enterprise backends that want to run your entire game and cost a fortune. Or burning precious development time building leaderboards from scratch. But more than that, the existing solutions were boring. They store scores and call it done. As a backend and product developer with game development as a hobby, I kept thinking: we could do so much more. The amplifying potential of leaderboards as social infrastructure is enormous, so much more than just data storage. They're the difference between "I beat the game" and "I need to beat Sarah's speedrun." Between a game you finish and a game you keep coming back to.

That's why LEADR exists. We follow the Unix philosophy: do one thing, and do it brilliantly. We're not trying to be your entire backend. We focus exclusively on leaderboards, achievements, and the social features that turn single-player experiences into community events. For more details check out our blog post on the topic, Why We Built a Game Leaderboard Service.

We're a small, bootstrapped outfit based in Europe, built by people who love playing, making, and supporting games. No venture capital, no pressure to pivot to blockchain, no quarterly targets forcing us to bloat the feature set. We're building something sustainable for the long term, growing organically with the indie community. The core platform is open-source under Apache 2.0:, so you can see exactly how it works, even self-host it if you want, and trust that we're not going anywhere because the code is yours regardless.

LEADR brings professional backend expertise to solve real game developer problems. This isn't about replicating the bloated all-in-one solutions that already exist. It's about building engagement infrastructure that actually makes games stickier and more social. Web-viewable leaderboards your players can share on Discord. Seasonal tournaments that create "just one more run" moments. Embeddable widgets for your game's website. Streamer integration that turns speedruns into community events. The features that matter, built for developers who want to focus on making great games instead of wrestling with backend configuration. Cross-platform from day one - Unity, Godot, Unreal, GameMaker, or anything that speaks HTTP. We play nice with your existing stack. We're not here to own your game; we're here to make it even more awesome.

We're still early in this journey, and we want to build LEADR alongside the indie community, not just for it. If you've got thoughts on what leaderboard infrastructure should look like, frustrations with existing tools, or just want to chat about game development - we'd love to hear from you.

Join us for a chat on Discord, find us on Reddit, or drop us an email at hello@leadr.gg. Your input shapes what we build. Let's make game services less boring together.