Dept. of Mysteries
Automattic Launches Spacefast, a Wondrous Home for Apps Built by AI Agents
Automattic has launched Spacefast, a new company that lets AI agents publish apps and websites with hosting, a domain and a SQL database in one place.
Monday, 9 November 2026 · 2 min read
Behold, a fresh decree from Automattic: Spacefast, a service for hosting apps and websites built with AI agents, opened to everyone on November 9, 2026. It is a new company from Automattic, and it promises to spare builders the arcane chores of picking a host, spinning up a database, wiring up sign-in and pointing to a domain. Users connect it to the AI they already work with, such as ChatGPT or Claude, ask the agent to put a project on Spacefast, and a few seconds later a link appears in the chat. Each project may claim hosting, its own domain and a SQL database, which is a structured store for an app's data, with built-in app authentication coming soon. Every publish produces a new version with its own permanent URL, so a builder may roll back at any time or link to an old build. Projects are private by default and can be shared with a password, an invite, a share link or the whole web, while approval checks stand guard over sensitive agent actions such as rollbacks and DNS changes. Spacefast charges for infrastructure, not AI credits, so users do not pay twice for inference, the computing that powers the AI itself. The service runs on the same Automattic infrastructure behind WordPress.com and Tumblr, which serves over 15 billion page views a month. It offers a free personal plan and appears as an official plugin in Claude, ChatGPT, Grok Bot, Cursor and Antigravity. The venture began during Radical Speed Month, when Automattic paused its development roadmaps earlier this year so that everyone could build something they were passionate about. Batuhan İçöz, then on the Beeper team, built a static hosting service on his own after nontechnical friends kept asking for help with GitHub. Spacefast soft-launched in September and became its own company, with İçöz as founder and CEO. TechCrunch reports that Spacefast competes, in a more open way, with rivals such as Lovable and Emergent, which offer both the interface and the infrastructure for vibe-coded apps, meaning software made largely by instructing an AI. İçöz told TechCrunch: "I thought there had to be a better way for everyone to set up and deploy their projects." According to TechCrunch, İçöz also anticipates that people will churn, or drift away from the service, because they may have no interest in making apps at all.
Source: automattic.com