WordPress.com’s parent company wants to be the place where AI-built apps go to live. Automattic introduced Spacefast on Monday, a hosting service that lets people tell the chatbot or coding agent they already use to publish a project, then hands back a working link in the chat.
The pitch goes after the chores that come after the code. In its launch post, Automattic said a user’s AI can now build a working app in an afternoon. “Then the setup starts,” the post continued, listing the host, database, sign-in, domain and access controls people still have to sort out themselves. Spacefast bundles hosting, custom domains and a SQL database, and the company said built-in app authentication is coming soon. Spacefast is set up as a new company from Automattic, and it opened to everyone today.
Bring your own AI
Spacefast doesn’t sell its own model. Automattic said it works with ChatGPT and Claude, personal assistants such as Muse and OpenClaw, and coding agents including Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, and that it ships tool descriptions and instructions written for the agent so the user doesn’t have to explain how to deploy. It’s also available as an MCP server, an API and a command-line tool, so developers can run npx spacefast publish from a terminal. “Spacefast charges for infrastructure, not AI credits, so you don’t pay for inference twice,” the company wrote.
Every publish creates a new version with its own permanent URL, and users can roll back at any time. Projects are private by default and can be shared by password, invite, share link or opened to the whole web. Automattic said sensitive agent actions, such as rollbacks and DNS changes, require an approval check. Visitors can leave comments on a page, and those can go straight back to the agent for fixes.
The Spacefast site lists a $0 Personal plan with no card required and an Enterprise tier with SSO, SAML and SCIM, log drains and dedicated support with an SLA. Anyone can publish without an account. Unclaimed projects normally expire 33 hours and 20 minutes after creation or the last publish that changes files, capped at 30 days from creation.
A hackathon project with WordPress.com’s plumbing
Founder and CEO Batuhan İçöz built the first version during Automattic’s Radical Speed Month, when the company paused its roadmaps and let staff build passion projects. He was working on the Beeper messaging team at the time, and non-technical friends kept sending him AI-made projects and asking for help with GitHub. Spacefast soft-launched in September and runs on the same infrastructure behind WordPress.com and Tumblr, which Automattic said serves over 15 billion page views a month.
İçöz told TechCrunch the idea started with a question about the company’s own network: “I thought, why do I have to use Cloudflare when we have a CDN (Content Delivery Network) just as good?” TechCrunch put the service up against vibe-coding platforms such as Lovable and Emergent, which bundle the building interface and the hosting rails together. Lovable’s rise as a European AI app builder was covered by WebProNews in August. Spacefast separates the two, leaving the building to whichever AI the customer picks.
Others are chasing the same small, AI-made web projects. Bluesky’s Attie encourages users to build their own mini social apps, while Mozilla is closing its Solo AI website builder and will delete all Solo sites on Nov. 30.
For business buyers, İçöz framed the pitch around clutter. “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,” he told TechCrunch. He also said he expects some users to churn, since not everyone who tries it will want to keep making apps.
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