Show HN: Railcode – Secure cloud for internal software (railcode.dev)
Railcode is like an internal Vercel for your company.
We built it after speaking to dozens of engineering leaders at various companies where employees were given access to Claude Code or Codex and started to build little tools (apps, agents) locally, but then struggled to share it with coworkers securely.
Typical scenarios are:
1. Employees can't share what they've built because of internal policies
2. Agents find the path of least resistance and deploy things on e.g. Vercel, leading to a sprawl of software that's a nightmare to manage (disjointed auth or no auth, API keys handled insecurely, no centralized management, etc.)
3. Companies set up templates to ensure some standardization but still require engineers in the loop to review and deploy code
Neither of these options felt great, so we built Railcode to be the place to deploy and manage internal software inside a company, ensuring projects are deployed securely, follow the same patterns, and can be easily managed from one place.
The goal is to unblock users to deploy and share what they've built while removing the burden on Engineering/DevOps to review and manage it all.
How we do this:
- Company auth in front of everything that's deployed
- Permissioned connectors to access data instead of shared API keys
- Infrastructure building blocks that make it easy to store data or use an LLM but allows admins to oversee everything (via a simple SDK)
- Centralized audit logs
- Unified design system (optional)
- Role-based access control with granular permissions that can be inherited by the projects themselves
The platform is built to be really low friction for agents and to not require folks changing their workflows. We support static frontends and serverless JS functions for the backend, meaning Tanstack, Hono, Vite, React, etc will all work. Even Next.js with OpenNext though that has some quirks :D
Projects run locally and everything Railcode-specific comes from an optional SDK. We ship a skill and a CLI and that's all you need to build and deploy projects or have agents manage configuration.
Keen to hear feedback!
5 comments
[ 0.39 ms ] story [ 18.6 ms ] threadI think one thing I'm struggling to understand is the underlying compute model and how it works. If you compare yourself to a cloud like AWS or a Neocloud platform like, say, Railway or Fly.io, what are you doing differently?
Originally Railcode started out as an AI-native Retool let's say. But while Retool added an MCP and now supports custom code they're still a reasonably rigid platform. I don't really believe a platform that's rigid works out today, and I'm also all-in on the user's own harness [1]. As a result we ended up building something that's a lot closer to Vercel as far as the flexibility and ownership you have, but with the governance layer of Retool.
I'd say we're technically a layer above plain compute.
In practice:
- Projects are just code. We can host static frontends and JavaScript serverless functions for the backend.
- When you deploy an app it's immediately behind company auth
- If you want to connect some data, you can e.g. connect an MCP and allow the Growth team to use that connection. Projects the Growth team builds can then use railcode.connector('posthog') and no API keys are ever shared
- If you connect a warehouse, you can create specific queries and assign them to users or roles to be able to build on top of, same model as connectors
- If you need to store some data, you can just do railcode.db.collections.create('orders') and it works. For an LLM it's railcode.llm.generate and admins can configure keys and manage spend centrally
- You can set a design system that agents follow when building apps in Railcode
Non-technical users don't need to manage infra or spin up a database (like they would on Vercel) and admins retain control and observability over everything that gets built.
Companies have started to build some version of this internally on top of Vercel, Railway, and Cloudflare, so I'd say we're somewhere in between an application layer thing and compute.
Genuinely curious: what would you call it if not a cloud?
[1] https://railcode.dev/blog/best-harness-is-your-own