Building an app with an AI assistant has become easy. Getting that app onto the open web, with a database, a link you can share and a way to see who is using it, has stayed surprisingly hard. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, launched Spacefast on 9 November to close that gap: you ask the chatbot or coding agent you already use to publish your project, and Spacefast hands back a working link in the chat.
Spacefast is deliberately not another AI app builder. Its own site says it plainly: it is "not an AI builder". Instead it plugs into the assistant you already have and gives that agent the hosting, storage and tools it needs. For anyone who has made something useful in a chat window and then hit a wall of servers, domains and deployment settings, that is the whole pitch.
What Spacefast Actually Does
Every project published through Spacefast lives in what the company calls a Space. Each Space gets its own permanent address, and according to Spacefast's product page, "Every Space comes with a database", with no setup required. Spaces can accept file uploads such as photos, documents and video, and they count visitors on their own: "Views, visitors, and your top pages, counted for you. There's no tracker to add."
Spaces are private by default. Owners can create share links, invite specific people, protect a Space with a password or make it public. Every publish saves a new version that can be rolled back, and a comments feature lets people leave feedback directly on the page. Updating is meant to be as simple as the first publish: "Ask your AI to publish again and the same link updates."
TechCrunch's launch report describes the service as infrastructure for vibe-coded apps, the term for software built mostly by describing it to an AI, including databases, authentication, file uploads, email and analytics, so that a prototype can behave like a real website, app or service. Automattic's own announcement is more precise on one point: it lists built-in app authentication as coming soon.
In that announcement, Automattic says Spacefast runs on the same infrastructure that serves WordPress.com and Tumblr, more than 15 billion page views a month, and that sensitive actions an agent takes, such as rollbacks and DNS changes, go through approval checks. Every publish also gets its own permanent URL, so an older build can still be linked to after a new one goes live.
Four Ways to Publish, None of Them a Server
The main route is conversational. Spacefast works with the assistants and agents people already use: TechCrunch lists ChatGPT, Claude, Hermes, OpenClaw, Grok Bot, Muse, Pi, Cursor, OpenCode and Amp, and the product page adds that any client supporting the Model Context Protocol, the open standard for connecting AI agents to outside tools, can connect too. In practice, the user types something like "publish this with Spacefast" and gets a link back.
Three other routes cover people who are not working in a chat. A service called drop.fast takes a dragged folder or zip file, with "No terminal, no account", according to the product page. Developers can connect a Git repository, where pushes to the main branch go live and other branches get preview links. And there is a one-line command-line option, npx spacefast publish. Supported frameworks include Next.js, TanStack Start, Astro and PHP projects.
That spread matters for Spacefast's audience. The same Space can start life as a quick drag-and-drop test by someone who has never opened a terminal, then move to a Git workflow once a developer joins the project, without changing address. The tools grow with the person rather than demanding that the person grow into the tools first.
The Hackathon Idea Behind It
The product is led by Batuhan İçöz, who started it during one of Automattic's hackathon sprints earlier in the year, while he was working on the company's Beeper messaging app. He told TechCrunch that while exploring vibe coding he often received Vercel links from non-technical friends, links to projects they had made with AI.
"I thought there had to be a better way for everyone to set up and deploy their projects. Automattic already has good infrastructure, but we have been traditionally associated with just WordPress. I thought, why do I have to use Cloudflare when we have a CDN (content delivery network) just as good? So I started working on what was called Stattic and now Spacefast," İçöz told TechCrunch.
Automattic's announcement fills in the rest. The company paused its development roadmaps earlier this year for what it called Radical Speed Month, giving everyone a month to build something they cared about. İçöz built a static hosting service on his own after friends kept sending him AI-made projects and asking for help with GitHub, then added a backend when users asked for one. Spacefast is now its own company, with İçöz as founder and chief executive.
Automattic soft-launched the product in September to gather feedback before the full launch. TechCrunch reports that early users have published internal mockups, slideshows and websites built around a specific offer, which is a useful guide to the scale Spacefast is aiming at first: small, specific projects that still need to work properly for the people who visit them.
What It Costs to Keep an App Online
Pricing is tiered and usage-based. The Personal plan costs nothing and needs no card. It includes $1 of usage every month, 20 Spaces and 20 custom domains, publishing from any agent, and commercial use is allowed. The Go plan costs $5 a month for $5 of usage, 100 Spaces and 100 custom domains, hourly database backups, a choice of datacenter and email support. The Pro plan costs $15 a month for $15 of usage and 500 Spaces and domains, is free for up to five members and then $15 a month per extra member, and adds team roles and wildcard domains. Enterprise plans add single sign-on and network controls. Automattic also stresses that Spacefast charges for infrastructure, not AI credits, so users do not pay twice for the AI work their assistant already does, and projects stay where they are if the user switches assistant later.
One detail is worth knowing before you share a link widely. Spaces that are never claimed by an account are temporary: they expire "33 hours and 20 minutes after creation or the latest publish that changes files, capped at 30 days from creation", according to the product page. Claimed Spaces stay live at the same address. So the no-account route is best treated as a way to try an idea quickly, not as a permanent home for it.
Your Agent, Your Choice, and the Trade-Off
Spacefast is entering a crowded field. TechCrunch names Lovable and Emergent as direct competitors, both of which combine the building interface with the hosting rails, and notes that Figma, Canva and Notion have launched products at the crossroads of vibe coding, mockups and presentations. Spacefast's answer is openness: İçöz argues that letting users keep their own agent and work their own way is the advantage over an all-in-one builder.
TechCrunch also records the obvious counter-argument: some users do not want to choose anything and would rather have everything decided for them. Both groups are real, and which one is larger will decide how far the open approach travels.
Automattic is also pitching the product upwards. "For enterprises, the problem right now is IT sprawl, as their marketing teams are churning out landing pages on services like Lovable, and they want to consolidate and work with a company that understands the enterprise needs. With our existing products, we have experience serving enterprise customers," İçöz said. TechCrunch adds that being inside Automattic gives Spacefast a path to web analytics, WordPress integration and e-commerce through WooCommerce.
İçöz is frank that he expects people to churn, because some of them may not be interested in making apps at all. "I think what we need to do as a product is make sure that when you build something with SpaceFast, it is so easy, and the results are so much better than without Spacefast," he told TechCrunch.
What It Means for Small Builders and Non-Developers
For the people MW3.biz writes for, solo founders, small businesses, teachers, organisers and anyone who has never deployed software, the significance is less about Automattic and more about the shape of the stack. Building used to require three separate skills: writing the code, running a server and managing a domain. AI assistants have largely absorbed the first. Services like Spacefast are trying to absorb the second and third, so that a person with an idea and a chat window can put something real in front of customers the same afternoon.
There are trade-offs to weigh before relying on it. Portability is partial: Spacefast says files from any retained version can be downloaded, and static sites usually move to another host as they are, but apps that use Spacefast's own runtimes need code changes to move, and app data has to be exported separately. Usage beyond the included monthly allowance costs extra, so a project that suddenly gets popular needs watching. And privacy-by-default protects early experiments, but it also means a creator must actively choose to make a Space public before customers can find it.
None of that changes the direction of travel. The tools for making software are now available to almost anyone with a laptop, and the race has moved to the last mile of getting that software online. Choosing between AI coding assistants is the earlier step in the same journey, and our look at how Cursor vs Claude Code changed with Claude at API prices covers what building with them now costs. Spacefast is a bet that the step after building should be as easy as asking.
