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 really be great is to read an in-depth post mortem on the project. Looking forward to it if you have time!
> 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.
measuring things by years is not really first principles thinking. i think the reality is that end user programming looks a lot more like notion than it is like valtown.
In this case, I think VC investment was essentially required because the idea for Val Town originally came from a VC (Dan Levine), rather than a founder - see 9.04ish onwards from the interview with Steve Krouse: https://puckacademy.substack.com/p/steve-krouse-on-val-towns...
That was my question. The little i understood of ValTown seemed like a sustainable, small business. No need for it to get huge. As long as it doesn't require hosting cheaper than customers would be wiling to pay. Given the type of services you could probably multi-tenant the boxes quite heavily and predictably (lots of crons you understand, etc).
I didn't look at it closely, but everything i saw looked like a great small business. VC money seems confusing, i must be missing a lot.
I was surprised when they decided to go w/ custom deno-based compute instead of Cloudflare + focusing on non-compute model/deliverables. Anyway, respect to Steve (I’d fly to you again, zero regrets) and his team!
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].
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.
Fair question! We're a much younger company and thus more malleable. Val Town was started basically pre-AI and had early traction that might have locked it into its path a little bit.
We're still figuring things out and this announcement is yet another data point about the simplified infra for devs space maybe not being very promising but most of our customers at the moment are actually non-technical teams who have struggled to use anything else. You could argue in some ways Val Town was tangentially in the same space as Lovable & Co and those companies are still going strong.
I think there's real signal in this announcement but it's also hard to derive general lessons for a whole market from a single company given how many variables come into play.
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?
val.town was built mostly pre-LLMs and it was basically lightweight typescript functions as a service. i thought they were doing ok, so i'm a bit surprised by this, but i do admit that I only ever used them for some throwaway toys
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!)
I'm really sad about this. Val Town is a beautiful collection of ideas, but I get how building a sustainable business on top of those ideas (not-quite commodity hosting, since people need to commit to the Val way of building) is extremely hard.
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the code in February when they open source it.
This is sad to see. I know what it's like to shut down a project that you've spent years on. It's really heartbreaking. I feel for Steve and the rest of the team.
I fear this is the reality of anything built around Deno after the Cloudflare acquisition. Thankfully agents are capable of handling most of the migration of the apps that everyone has built on top of it.
For anyone looking for a new home for their projects, I'm the founder of Easel.sh [0], an app hosting platform. I've been putting together migration guides covering how to move workloads from Val Town onto Easel. It's not a drop-in replacement for everything Val Town offered, but I think we can be a good fit for quite a few use cases.
I'm happy to personally help anyone who is looking to migrate.
Loved what Steve and the team at Val Town were building from the very start. So sad to see this news.
I remember one of the silly little services I built on Val Town getting DDoS’d and knocking Val Town offline for a short time. Steve sent me a handwritten note and a Val Town baseball cap thanking me for helping them improve their defences. Class act.
Feels like there’s an era of devtools companies coming to a close. Astro, Astral, Deno, Bun, Turso, Void Zero all got acquired. I’m guessing there’s either very compelling acquisition offers being floated or the fundraising/revenue environment isn’t as friendly?
Right, they said an era is coming to a close. Their tone’s maybe wistful but not final. M&A cycle is an expression of the same idea? New era beginning. Containers and sandboxes and “harnesses” are in. (I hate that word harness - wish we’d call them rigs or something with less questionable metaphor.)
harness initially annoyed me as well. i asked chatgpt why it’s called a harness and since then im now fully onboard heh.
the agent explained that the metaphor is about steering, a horse harness steers but it’s not technically the control, it’s a suggestion to the horse. The harness is about defining boundaries and such. You perhaps already know this, it’s just that in this instant-meme world, the fact that a word has a substantive meaning is comforting.
Can't speak on the former but it's no secret on the latter: ALL the investor money is going into fucking AI right now, and it's suffocating anything else. Add to that the AI industry's taxing our silicon industry and we have a recipe for startup bloodbath.
For emphasis, I'm not saying fucking AI has no uses, I'm just saying I wish there was OTHER tech available to talk about too.
Steve is incredibly thoughtful about the art of programming. He has written a lot of insightful commentary over the years. A highly recommended read.
Steve inspired us to build a val.town-like platform Gitlip (https://gitlip.com/) in early 2025. We quietly stopped working on it about a year ago because it was difficult to get paying customers.
Sad to hear this, big fan of val.town since the early days.
I've been thinking that the idea of a cloud for personal applications makes less sense as time goes on - because that area of the market will be captured by the harnesses that alloe people to build their toy project in the first place - like how Claude can deploy your websites.
Steve, I don't know whether you can read this but any chance the code can be made open source. It would greatly help me and others to extend your vision.
I feel like these kinds of platforms which simplify the hosting and development with AI will be critical. I bootstrapped a product in the space but I'm not feeling the interest yet from other people and I'm just using it for myself and a few close customers for now. Not really promoting anymore even though it cut my own development and maintenance time by at least 90% and significantly improved security.
I think people need to experience more critical vulnerabilities, more hacks, more pain.
When vibe coders will be lost in tangled webs of complexity with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, unhappy customers and they can't find engineers to fix their slop (because the good ones are all too busy fixing other slop) and they are on their knees begging for relief, that will be the right time.
Or maybe it will be after that point. Let them hit rock bottom and their startup collapse due to complexity. Then I can try to promote to them for their next startup. Start-up failure due to complexity hasn't really been a bottleneck in the past; usually product-market fit is the bottleneck but I'm hoping this changes.
Paul Graham said it right, "Make something people want" and it's a very different problem from "Make something people need". I'm sure I made something people need, but they won't know they "want" it until they've felt a significant amount of pain.
Steve and the team at Val town were amazing. I loved the product and I also loved the team who were incredibly approachable and very community centric.
sorry it did not work out. To your customers: feel free to check out https://controlplane.com - it handles all your use cases and them some. You can converse with it your agent of choice, and it comes with a UI, CLI, API, Terraform, Pulumi and MCP. It lets you run across any cloud and on-prem with the same interface. it is very cost effective and supports ANY service of any cloud, including over a hundred open source templates like Postgres, CockrochDB, Kafka, Rabbit, Cassandra and much more. I am the ceo of Control Plane. Ask me anything.
https://controlplane.com
I actually created one simple agent back then on Val Town that checks any new sign ups to my app and then posts to Slack. It was free but I've never created anything else on their platform.
I kind of liked their story and wanted to support them. Their UX wasn't great for one (back when I tried it at least). But I think the bigger problem is that the big opportunity for them was that they started early before it was crowded, and if they didn't capture a big market share then, now it's too late and impossible to compete. For agents to be useful you need to integrate them with all your services and data, and if you're already using a trusted provider Like Claude or CloudFlare etc. then it's easy just to stick with their offerings.
Not to be a downer but these things built on platforms like Deno seem more like side projects than actual serious ventures. Use at your own risk, I suppose.
It also seems like a very narrow product, compared to most competition. I suppose the main value proposition was ease of use, but it had so many limitations, by itself that doesn’t seem like enough.
This is the kind of business that one would think VCs would flag as needing more work on the business model before it justifies any funding.
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 really be great is to read an in-depth post mortem on the project. Looking forward to it if you have time!
> 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.
measuring things by years is not really first principles thinking. i think the reality is that end user programming looks a lot more like notion than it is like valtown.
the only successful example of end user programming is Excel. start there and work backwards.
Why bother with investing, why not just build it small and sustainable to begin with?
I think that's what's he's cooking now: https://github.com/mech-lang I still keep checking on it. There were a lot of great ideas in Eve.
To be clear, the "he" is not Steve, but the parent poster. Maybe obvious, wasn't to me 8)
In this case, I think VC investment was essentially required because the idea for Val Town originally came from a VC (Dan Levine), rather than a founder - see 9.04ish onwards from the interview with Steve Krouse: https://puckacademy.substack.com/p/steve-krouse-on-val-towns...
That was my question. The little i understood of ValTown seemed like a sustainable, small business. No need for it to get huge. As long as it doesn't require hosting cheaper than customers would be wiling to pay. Given the type of services you could probably multi-tenant the boxes quite heavily and predictably (lots of crons you understand, etc).
I didn't look at it closely, but everything i saw looked like a great small business. VC money seems confusing, i must be missing a lot.
If you're in the "vc-world" a small business is hard to wrap your brain around; it's an entirely different think and thing.
good on steve & team for tryin'. brutal market & yeah a postmortem is needed.
I was surprised when they decided to go w/ custom deno-based compute instead of Cloudflare + focusing on non-compute model/deliverables. Anyway, respect to Steve (I’d fly to you again, zero regrets) and his team!
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].
[0] https://deno.com/blog/cloudflare
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.
whoa - we're building something very similar. i scheduled some time with you.
very much agree that I've been inspired by val.town's craft
well.. how does his decision affect how you feel about the space you're in?
Fair question! We're a much younger company and thus more malleable. Val Town was started basically pre-AI and had early traction that might have locked it into its path a little bit.
We're still figuring things out and this announcement is yet another data point about the simplified infra for devs space maybe not being very promising but most of our customers at the moment are actually non-technical teams who have struggled to use anything else. You could argue in some ways Val Town was tangentially in the same space as Lovable & Co and those companies are still going strong.
I think there's real signal in this announcement but it's also hard to derive general lessons for a whole market from a single company given how many variables come into play.
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?
val.town was built mostly pre-LLMs and it was basically lightweight typescript functions as a service. i thought they were doing ok, so i'm a bit surprised by this, but i do admit that I only ever used them for some throwaway toys
Also surprised.
search hn, theyve ranked very highly consistently over the years
It's like var town but it's not mutable.
Ba dum chah
Well it’s definitely not constant
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!)
I'm really sad about this. Val Town is a beautiful collection of ideas, but I get how building a sustainable business on top of those ideas (not-quite commodity hosting, since people need to commit to the Val way of building) is extremely hard.
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the code in February when they open source it.
This is sad to see. I know what it's like to shut down a project that you've spent years on. It's really heartbreaking. I feel for Steve and the rest of the team.
I fear this is the reality of anything built around Deno after the Cloudflare acquisition. Thankfully agents are capable of handling most of the migration of the apps that everyone has built on top of it.
For anyone looking for a new home for their projects, I'm the founder of Easel.sh [0], an app hosting platform. I've been putting together migration guides covering how to move workloads from Val Town onto Easel. It's not a drop-in replacement for everything Val Town offered, but I think we can be a good fit for quite a few use cases.
I'm happy to personally help anyone who is looking to migrate.
[0]: https://www.easel.sh
Following up here with the migration guides I promised:
https://www.easel.sh/val-town
https://www.easel.sh/docs/migration/val-town
Loved what Steve and the team at Val Town were building from the very start. So sad to see this news.
I remember one of the silly little services I built on Val Town getting DDoS’d and knocking Val Town offline for a short time. Steve sent me a handwritten note and a Val Town baseball cap thanking me for helping them improve their defences. Class act.
Goodbye, Val Town...
https://juli--01a1c6ce5cec761daadca9a5a6624b49.web.val.run/
Ever since you were esm.town, you were a lovely little platform for the fun side of the web.
Feels like there’s an era of devtools companies coming to a close. Astro, Astral, Deno, Bun, Turso, Void Zero all got acquired. I’m guessing there’s either very compelling acquisition offers being floated or the fundraising/revenue environment isn’t as friendly?
or this is just normal startup M&A cycles and you just happened to pay attention to this one more closely
Right, they said an era is coming to a close. Their tone’s maybe wistful but not final. M&A cycle is an expression of the same idea? New era beginning. Containers and sandboxes and “harnesses” are in. (I hate that word harness - wish we’d call them rigs or something with less questionable metaphor.)
harness initially annoyed me as well. i asked chatgpt why it’s called a harness and since then im now fully onboard heh.
the agent explained that the metaphor is about steering, a horse harness steers but it’s not technically the control, it’s a suggestion to the horse. The harness is about defining boundaries and such. You perhaps already know this, it’s just that in this instant-meme world, the fact that a word has a substantive meaning is comforting.
Can't speak on the former but it's no secret on the latter: ALL the investor money is going into fucking AI right now, and it's suffocating anything else. Add to that the AI industry's taxing our silicon industry and we have a recipe for startup bloodbath.
For emphasis, I'm not saying fucking AI has no uses, I'm just saying I wish there was OTHER tech available to talk about too.
Most of them are still alive and active, Deno is the exception here.
Steve is incredibly thoughtful about the art of programming. He has written a lot of insightful commentary over the years. A highly recommended read.
Steve inspired us to build a val.town-like platform Gitlip (https://gitlip.com/) in early 2025. We quietly stopped working on it about a year ago because it was difficult to get paying customers.
This is a bummer. Val.town was an inspiration for my own open source work on personal apps platforms.
We still badly need a replacement for Glitch.com. There are no free dynamic server hosts anymore.
I've spoken to Steve a few times and he gave great advice.
I'm sorry to hear this didn't work out for him, but there's no doubt that he'll get the next one (or maybe the one after that).
Sad to hear this, big fan of val.town since the early days.
I've been thinking that the idea of a cloud for personal applications makes less sense as time goes on - because that area of the market will be captured by the harnesses that alloe people to build their toy project in the first place - like how Claude can deploy your websites.
Steve, I don't know whether you can read this but any chance the code can be made open source. It would greatly help me and others to extend your vision.
It's mentioned in the blog post
I missed it, thanks!
I feel like these kinds of platforms which simplify the hosting and development with AI will be critical. I bootstrapped a product in the space but I'm not feeling the interest yet from other people and I'm just using it for myself and a few close customers for now. Not really promoting anymore even though it cut my own development and maintenance time by at least 90% and significantly improved security.
I think people need to experience more critical vulnerabilities, more hacks, more pain.
When vibe coders will be lost in tangled webs of complexity with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, unhappy customers and they can't find engineers to fix their slop (because the good ones are all too busy fixing other slop) and they are on their knees begging for relief, that will be the right time.
Or maybe it will be after that point. Let them hit rock bottom and their startup collapse due to complexity. Then I can try to promote to them for their next startup. Start-up failure due to complexity hasn't really been a bottleneck in the past; usually product-market fit is the bottleneck but I'm hoping this changes.
Paul Graham said it right, "Make something people want" and it's a very different problem from "Make something people need". I'm sure I made something people need, but they won't know they "want" it until they've felt a significant amount of pain.
Steve and the team at Val town were amazing. I loved the product and I also loved the team who were incredibly approachable and very community centric.
Thank you Steve
I'm gonna miss it. It was such a solid place for a v0.5 of something where I get hosting, a db, subdomains, logging, and more right off the bat.
Thank you for a wonderful service!
Sad to see this. Val town was a great little platform! Lots of cool ideas
Whaaaat. I thought this was a successful business??
Sorry to hear this. Hopefully will be open sourced?
From the link:
> Open-sourcing Val Town - Feb 1, 2027
Says open sourcing on Feb 1 right in the blog post ;).
Dang. Missed it. (sorry!) Glad to see open sourcing..
Aw, I liked Val Town. Any self-hosted alternatives people like?
Not a 1:1 alternative but lots of overlap with https://windmill.dev
smallweb.run is basically self-hosted val.town
Seems like they are open sourcing it early next year, so maybe Val Town is the best self hosted alternative to itself.
That would be pretty fantastic. In my experience, enterprise products can be annoying to scale down, though.
There's need for this type of service, make bun town maybe. Open sourcing might get it somewhere
sorry it did not work out. To your customers: feel free to check out https://controlplane.com - it handles all your use cases and them some. You can converse with it your agent of choice, and it comes with a UI, CLI, API, Terraform, Pulumi and MCP. It lets you run across any cloud and on-prem with the same interface. it is very cost effective and supports ANY service of any cloud, including over a hundred open source templates like Postgres, CockrochDB, Kafka, Rabbit, Cassandra and much more. I am the ceo of Control Plane. Ask me anything. https://controlplane.com
Seeing a lot of wind down posts recently, guessing that will only accelerate
Out of curiosity, what other companies have put out "wind down posts" recently and is there a common theme to them?
Tailwind
I’ll say the same thing I did with Deno’s death: it’s a shame.
You are great Steve, thanks for building val.town.
I actually created one simple agent back then on Val Town that checks any new sign ups to my app and then posts to Slack. It was free but I've never created anything else on their platform.
I kind of liked their story and wanted to support them. Their UX wasn't great for one (back when I tried it at least). But I think the bigger problem is that the big opportunity for them was that they started early before it was crowded, and if they didn't capture a big market share then, now it's too late and impossible to compete. For agents to be useful you need to integrate them with all your services and data, and if you're already using a trusted provider Like Claude or CloudFlare etc. then it's easy just to stick with their offerings.
Thanks for the migration guide!
Tough
Not to be a downer but these things built on platforms like Deno seem more like side projects than actual serious ventures. Use at your own risk, I suppose.
It also seems like a very narrow product, compared to most competition. I suppose the main value proposition was ease of use, but it had so many limitations, by itself that doesn’t seem like enough.
This is the kind of business that one would think VCs would flag as needing more work on the business model before it justifies any funding.