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!
cmontella
Not mentioned directly in the blog post, but Val Town was fundamentally organized around the Deno runtime, whose team will stop maintaining it next year after joining Cloudflare [0].
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.
yakkomajuri
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?
Zambyte
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.
simonw
There’s a lot of love in the comments here. I’m struggling to understand how something so useful and loved can fail. Is this just one of this cases where people love something but don’t want to pay anything for it? Or were the costs of compute too high? I hope there’s a more detailed retrospective in the future that we all can learn from.
This is sad to see. I know what it's like to shut down a project that you've spent years on. It's really heartbreaking. I feel for Steve and the rest of the team.
I fear this is the reality of anything built around Deno after the Cloudflare acquisition. Thankfully agents are capable of handling most of the migration of the apps that everyone has built on top of it.
For anyone looking for a new home for their projects, I'm the founder of Easel.sh [0], an app hosting platform. I've been putting together migration guides covering how to move workloads from Val Town onto Easel. It's not a drop-in replacement for everything Val Town offered, but I think we can be a good fit for quite a few use cases.
I'm happy to personally help anyone who is looking to migrate.
So bummed to hear! Really appreciate y'all opening your doors to us every Saturday for https://sideprojectsaturday.com/, it's consistently been one of my favorite parts of the week. (Shout out to Justin!)
fcjr
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?
comments (10)
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!
cmontella
[0] https://deno.com/blog/cloudflare
jrmann100
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.
yakkomajuri
Zambyte
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the code in February when they open source it.
simonw
brightbed
andsoitis
I fear this is the reality of anything built around Deno after the Cloudflare acquisition. Thankfully agents are capable of handling most of the migration of the apps that everyone has built on top of it.
For anyone looking for a new home for their projects, I'm the founder of Easel.sh [0], an app hosting platform. I've been putting together migration guides covering how to move workloads from Val Town onto Easel. It's not a drop-in replacement for everything Val Town offered, but I think we can be a good fit for quite a few use cases.
I'm happy to personally help anyone who is looking to migrate.
[0]: https://www.easel.sh
seanw265
fcjr
hardwaregeek