Val Town shuts down after failing to compete in cloud computing
Val Town is winding down
Val Town is winding down after four years, unable to compete in cloud computing. Billing is paused and existing subscriptions continue free; annual prepayments get partial refunds. New signups end today, read-only mode starts December 10, and all services stop January 10, 2027. The code will be open-sourced February 1, 2027. Migration guides cover Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, and Render.
The bad news about our business – that we couldn’t compete in the cloud computing space – is good news for you migrating off: there are many wonderful hosting providers you can migrate to, and today’s LLMs are great at these types of migrations.
- cmontella
I remember Steve from my days working on Eve, he was part of that community and always a big proponent of end-user programming. I was happy to see him working on this project but am not surprised it's shutting down.
Nothing to to do with the quality of Val Town, but making a business in this space is really, really hard. You can't start the business without raising millions (Eve raised $2M, Darklang raised $3.5M, Val Town raised $7M), but it's hard to scale out a proof of concept in the time investors want to start seeing an ROI. It seems to me about 2-3 years is all you get for seed runway, when realistically projects like this should take at minimum 5 years incubating. Darklang extended their runway to ~7-8 years by firing all the devs and keeping just the founder on life support. Ultimately even that wasn't enough.
But maybe with AI this could work, I dunno.
What's required to make it all work is a fundamental leap in programming interface design, but the business side doesn't look any different from a typical SaaS. So unless you hit the ball out of the park you're entering the market with an experimental product, then you have to deal with product-market fit even if you have the right product, so you really only have one shot.
It's very hard to go back to investors and ask for another round of funding when there's no discernable market and the product isn't gaining the traction investors would like to see.
Anyway, kudos to Steve for fighting the good fight! What would rea […]
- jrmann100
Not mentioned directly in the blog post, but Val Town was fundamentally organized around the Deno runtime, whose team will stop maintaining it next year after joining Cloudflare [0].
- yakkomajuri
This is sad. We're in a similar space as Val Town (which technically made us competitors) but I've always appreciated the care they had for the craft and the values they drove forward as a company like their transparency (even their investor updates were public).
Steve and Tom also individually have some of the best blogs out on the web.
I wish them all the best with whatever comes next. I'm pretty sure they'll all do great things.
- Zambyte
It seems like everyone here knows what this is but me. I went to their homepage and I still can't tell what this is. How is this different from just giving your agent access to one of the many hosting services CLIs / MCPs? Did they just pioneer that?
- fcjr
So bummed to hear! Really appreciate y'all opening your doors to us every Saturday for https://sideprojectsaturday.com/, it's consistently been one of my favorite parts of the week. (Shout out to Justin!)