Not mentioned directly in the blog post, but Val Town was fundamentally organized around the Deno runtime, whose team will stop developing it next year after joining Cloudflare [0].
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.
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.
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'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.
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
Small web scripts that can email you and you can cron schedule them. They used to let you do this for free so I used it for web monitoring (like if a site restocks the product I want).
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!
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.
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...
> 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.
Interestingly, Darklang is still going, with a new company started by the employees when the company ended in 2025. It's built to be a small company, not a VC-backed scale up success. The focus is on making a language that is excellent for AI-based coding.
More information will be coming on the progress of the new team (I am part of the old team, and advising the new team), but some info on the transition is at [1][2][3]
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.
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.
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.
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'd argue we don't. Just use a coding agent and deploy to either Cloudflare or Vercel.
What is popular on HN doesn't correlate with what can be made a business. We built a product in the space (gitlip.com) and the demand was nonexistent. And now this is further proven by val.town deciding to wind down.
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.
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.
88 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 55.9 ms ] threadSorry to hear this. Hopefully will be open sourced?
> Open-sourcing Val Town - Feb 1, 2027
[0] https://deno.com/blog/cloudflare
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.
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.
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'm definitely looking forward to seeing the code in February when they open source it.
that's almost every VC-funded SaaS from the ZIRP era of incestuous circular money-wasting.
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!
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.
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.
More information will be coming on the progress of the new team (I am part of the old team, and advising the new team), but some info on the transition is at [1][2][3]
[1] https://blog.darklang.com/first-steps-of-darklang-inc/
[2] https://blog.darklang.com/goodbye-dark-inc-welcome-darklang-...
[3] https://blog.darklang.com/darklang-goes-open-source/
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.
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.
nah val town wanted a v different type of user than lovable
very much agree that I've been inspired by val.town's craft
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for a wonderful service!
What is popular on HN doesn't correlate with what can be made a business. We built a product in the space (gitlip.com) and the demand was nonexistent. And now this is further proven by val.town deciding to wind down.
Thank you Steve