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!
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].
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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
It's like var town but it's not mutable.
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.
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.
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'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!
We still badly need a replacement for Glitch.com. There are no free dynamic server hosts anymore.
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.
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?
Most of them are still alive and active, Deno is the exception here.
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.
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.
There's need for this type of service, make bun town maybe. Open sourcing might get it somewhere
Sad to see this. Val town was a great little platform! Lots of cool ideas
Aw, I liked Val Town. Any self-hosted alternatives people like?
Not a 1:1 alternative but lots of overlap with https://windmill.dev
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.
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..
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
You are great Steve, thanks for building val.town.
I’ll say the same thing I did with Deno’s death: it’s a shame.
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.