Background functions are available on Pro plans and above, providing a way to run processes in the background while the user resumes their flow. They are useful for tasks such as generating reports, scraping data from websites, and batch processing scripts. Background functions work by invoking an asynchronous function that runs separately until it completes, with the server returning a 202 response to indicate whether the invocation was successful or not. To create a background function, simply append -background to the filename of your serverless function, and export a handler function as you would for a standard serverless function. Background functions differ from traditional serverless functions in that they do not return additional responses about code execution success or failure, but instead rely on monitoring elsewhere to track issues.