Val Town

Instant deployments for you and your agents: write TypeScript and ship it to a live URL in moments.

Val Town is a hosted platform where browser-written TypeScript goes live on save, running on Deno as HTTP endpoints, crons or email handlers, each val with its own SQLite database. Val Town, Inc. was co-founded by Steve Krouse and Tom MacWright, launched in July 2022, and raised a $5.5m seed led by Accel. It also offers the Townie AI agent, an MCP server and the vt CLI. Val Town pricing page (as of 2026-10-25): Free is $0; Pro is $25 a month, monthly price.

EditorialUpdated Oct 25, 202610 min read

The Val Town interface

What it is

Val Town is a hosted platform for running code. The About page describes it as an automation and internal tools platform for programmers, and calls its users "know-code" engineers: people who want tools that work immediately without configuring infrastructure, but who also want the full power of code when they need it. A founding poem from 2022 sums up the idea: if GitHub Gists could run, and AWS Lambda were fun.

The basic unit is the val. A val is a set of versioned TypeScript files that can carry three kinds of triggers, HTTP, cron and email: an HTTP val gets a public URL, a cron val runs on a schedule, and an email val runs when mail arrives. The runtime docs say code runs on Deno, Deno 2.9.6 as of 2026-10-25, with TypeScript and TSX support and no filesystem access; storage goes through SQLite or blob storage instead.

Around the val, the platform provides a SQLite database, blob storage, environment variables, logs, branches and version history, plus an in-browser AI coding agent called Townie. Since January 2026, every val has its own SQLite database and a built-in database browser. External interfaces include a remote MCP server, the vt command-line tool, a TypeScript SDK, and a plugin for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.

The company is Val Town, Inc., the name used in the terms of use and the site footer. The About page lists the team: co-founder and CEO Steve Krouse, co-founder and CTO Tom MacWright, plus a COO, a design engineer, a growth engineer and a writer-engineer. The investor is Dan Levine at Accel.

If GitHub Gists could run and AWS Lambda were fun
Val Town About page, founding poem

Core capabilities

First, it goes live on save. The Townie v5 launch post says that, like every edit on the platform, changes deploy to a URL or a branch-preview URL in 100 ms. The same post says version history and branching let users move fast without breaking things.

Second, storage is built in. The SQLite docs say the database is powered by Turso, with 10MB on the free plan and up to 1GB on paid plans. A launch post on 2026-01-23 says every val gets its own database; a user forking their own project can fork the database too; and the built-in database browser can add columns, delete rows, show table schemas, run queries, and export tables as CSV or the whole database as SQL.

Third, the AI agent. The Townie docs say Townie can do almost anything a user can do in the UI: read, write and run code; read SQLite, blob storage, logs and environment variables; and schedule crons. The 2026-09-10 changelog says Townie gained an "Auto" mode that no longer asks permission for low-risk actions such as reading files, while potentially destructive actions such as writing to SQLite still need approval.

Fourth, external interfaces. The MCP docs say compatible AI apps can read, edit, run and deploy vals through Val Town's MCP server. The plugin released on 2026-06-05 bundles the MCP server with platform skills and supports Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. The vt command-line tool shipped on 2025-09-10; it works much like git, and vt watch pushes and redeploys automatically whenever a file is saved locally.

Fifth, collaboration and permissions. The 2026-09-10 changelog says Val Town Access lets vals be shared like shared documents: restricted to a team, shared by email, or fully public. The same release added an App view for HTTP vals and 14-day free trials for Pro and Business.

Who it's for / Not for

Good fit: programmers who want a script, a webhook, a scheduled scraper or a small internal tool online within minutes. The About page calls its target users "know-code" engineers, and the July 2026 investor update says the team's current use-case focus is internal tools, especially for growth and go-to-market work.

Good fit: people already using Claude Code, Codex or Cursor. The plugin launch post says that with the plugin, a coding agent can write idiomatic vals and deploy them live in 100 ms. The May 2026 investor update says 25% of new users in the previous 30 days reported learning about Val Town from Claude.

Good fit: small technical teams. The February 2026 investor update says the ideal customer is an early-stage technical startup, especially a small, fast-moving team where the people buying the product are the same people using it.

Not a fit: jobs that need local filesystem access, long run times or lots of memory. The runtime docs say filesystem access is not permitted; the limits page lists wall-clock time per run of 1 minute on Free and 10 minutes on paid plans, a 6-hour ceiling on a single worker's lifetime, 4 GiB of memory, and at most 80,000 characters per source file.

Not a fit: Free-plan users who want to keep code private. The May 2026 investor update says private and unlisted vals are no longer available on the Free plan; the limits page lists 0 private vals for Free.

Not a fit: teams that need a formal compliance report before buying. The security docs say a SOC 2 Type 2 audit is under way and expected to complete in late Q4 2026, and the bug bounty program is currently paused.

How it compares

Versus Cloudflare Workers: the Cloudflare Workers pricing page (as of 2026-10-25) lists a Free plan with 100,000 requests a day and 10 ms of CPU time per invocation; the Paid plan has a minimum of $5 per account per month, includes 10 million requests a month, and charges $0.30 per additional million. Workers is priced by usage, while Val Town charges a flat monthly plan fee.

Versus Deno Deploy: the Deno Deploy pricing page (as of 2026-10-25) lists monthly prices: Free at $0 a month with 1M requests a month and 5 custom domains; Pro at $20 a month with 5M requests a month; Builder at $200 a month; Enterprise by contacting sales. The same page carries a "Deno is joining Cloudflare" banner at the top. Val Town's own runtime is Deno.

Val Town puts the editor, storage, logs, crons and an AI agent in one web page. The February 2026 investor update places Val Town in the middle of the abstraction spectrum: more flexible than low-code platforms such as Retool, Zapier and Clay, and simpler than deployment platforms such as Vercel, Render and Railway.

Getting started

Step one: signing up for a free account at val.town. The Free plan allows unlimited public vals, 100,000 runs a day, crons as often as every 15 minutes, and 3 days of log retention. Free cannot create private vals, so anything put in code is public.

Step two: a new HTTP val that returns a Response object gets a URL when saved. Data storage uses std/sqlite to reach the val's own database, or blob storage; the platform docs say secrets can be stored as the val's environment variables, which code reads through Deno.env or process.env (as of 2026-10-26).

Step three: ways to write. The robot icon in the top right of the web editor opens Townie; one command, npx plugins add val-town/plugins, installs the plugin for Claude Code, Codex or Cursor; or, with Deno present, deno install -grAf jsr:@valtown/vt installs the vt command-line tool for writing in a local editor.

Step four: Pro adds longer run times, private vals, more custom domains and the ability to email anyone. The 2026-09-10 changelog says both Pro and Business have a 14-day free trial.

Pricing & license

The Val Town pricing page (as of 2026-10-25) lists four tiers. Free is $0 a month: MCP integration, no custom domains, crons every 15 minutes at most, 1 minute per run, unlimited public vals, 3 days of log retention, 100,000 runs a day, and email to the account owner only.

Pro is $25 a month on the monthly price, or $21 a month on the yearly price: $10 of Townie credit a month, 10 custom domains, crons as often as every minute, 10 minutes per run, 2,000 private vals, 10 days of log retention, 1,000,000 runs a day, and email to anyone.

Business starts at $200 a month on the monthly price, or $167 a month on the yearly price: on top of Pro it adds $100 of Townie credit a month, unlimited custom domains, 5 million runs a day, team accounts, Val Town Access and Slack Connect. Enterprise is custom-priced and also lists log export, SOC 2 and custom support.

Townie is billed by usage. The Townie Credits launch post of 2025-06-11 says the platform charges a 50% markup on raw model costs; the Townie docs list monthly credit caps of $100 on Business, $10 on Pro and $1 on Free.

License: the platform itself is closed source. The vt command-line tool repo on GitHub is MIT-licensed, had 144 stars as of 2026-10-25, and has no GitHub Releases.

Risks & limits

Security record. A security disclosure on 2023-01-13 says the sandbox, then based on vm2, had a critical vulnerability; the team closed it the same day, rotated database keys, suffered brief downtime, and judged that it had not been exploited. The post also advised users not to put particularly sensitive information on the platform for the time being. The platform later moved to Deno.

Data isolation incident. A post-mortem on 2023-11-24 says that from 17 October to 20 November 2023, all users' queries to the Turso-based SQLite integration hit a single shared database, with data visible and mutable to any customer; the cause was a flag change in an early Turso beta feature, which Turso then fixed. The post says very few queries in that period touched other users' tables, and most collisions were on a test table used in examples.

Compliance and bug bounty. The security docs say the SOC 2 Type 2 audit is expected to complete in late Q4 2026 and the bug bounty is paused. The pricing page lists SOC 2 under Enterprise.

Runtime limits. The limits page says a worker shuts down after 10 seconds idle, a single worker lives at most 6 hours, and memory is 4 GiB; the cron limit is stated differently in two places: the limits page gives 10 crons per val on Free and 50 on Pro and Business, while the 2026-09-10 changelog says 10 on Free and 100 on paid plans.

The terms of service restrict use in some regions and for some purposes; see the terms for details.

Business figures. The May 2026 investor update says ARR grew 3% that month, short of the 20% monthly goal. The July 2026 investor update says ARR grew 6% that month, also short of the 20% goal.

How it got here

July 2022: Val Town launches. Newsletter 10, on 5 July 2023, says Val Town turned one that day.

August 2022: Dan Levine at Accel leads a $1.5m pre-seed round.

September 2022: Tom MacWright's runtime retrospective says the original Node.js vm approach was introduced in July 2022 and replaced by vm2 on 1 September. The val-town GitHub organization was created on 2022-09-24 08:31 (UTC+8).

13 January 2023: a security disclosure reports a vm2 sandbox vulnerability, and the team announces a move to Deno. The runtime retrospective says two further runtimes followed: Deno with Workers, then Deno with process isolation.

31 May 2023: Newsletter 8 announces Val Town Pro.

3 October 2023: Val Town v3 is announced with web-standard JavaScript and JSX support; secrets move to process.env and Deno.env, and vals become importable in Deno, Node and the browser.

24 November 2023: the post-mortem on SQLite data sharing is published.

9 April 2024: a $5.5m seed round led by Accel is announced, and Dan Levine joins the board.

27 February 2025: the vt repo is created on GitHub at 2025-02-27 04:35 (UTC+8). On 11 June 2025 Townie moves to usage-based billing; on 10 September 2025 the vt command-line tool is officially released.

January 2026: Townie v5 launches on the Claude 4.5 model family; the next day every val gets its own database.

17 March 2026: Steve Krouse publishes the February 2026 investor update on the blog, sharing revenue growth, target customers and positioning, with monthly updates after that.

5 June 2026: the plugin for coding agents goes live. On 10 June 2026 the May investor update says private vals are no longer available on the Free plan, and reports the first fully self-serve Business subscriber.

11 August 2026: the July investor update describes Val Town as an instant deploy platform for small apps and says the SOC 2 Type II audit has started.

10 September 2026: the changelog says the runtime moved to Deno 2.9.6, and Val Town Access and 14-day free trials launched.

Our verdict

Val Town lets users write TypeScript in the browser and deploy on save, gives every val its own SQLite database, and connects to AI tools through Townie, the MCP server, the vt command-line tool and the coding-agent plugin.

Its limits: Free cannot create private vals, the SOC 2 audit is not finished, the bug bounty is paused, and there have been past security and data isolation incidents; the May 2026 and July 2026 investor updates say monthly ARR growth fell short of the 20% goal.

Why it stands out

Val Town treats a function as a social object. Write a few lines of TypeScript, hit save, and you have an HTTP endpoint, a cron job, or an email handler that is live. Public vals can be forked by anyone, and since May 2026 new vals on the free plan are public.

Steve Krouse and Tom MacWright co-founded it, and the product is opinionated about small programs, readable URLs, and the idea that most automation wants to be a paragraph of code, not a repository.

Saving a few lines of TypeScript gives you a live HTTP endpoint, cron job or email handler; public vals can be forked by anyone.