{"generated_at":"2026-11-12T18:49:26.784Z","source":{"name":"Hacker News public API","url":"https://github.com/HackerNews/API","attribution":"Stories and comments are public Hacker News submissions by their respective authors. HackerHub is an independent reader, not affiliated with Y Combinator.","content_is_untrusted":true},"story_id":50443427,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50443427","total_comments":99,"returned":20,"scope":"Up to the requested number of top-level comments in Hacker News ranked order. Deleted comments are omitted. Nested replies are not fetched; this is not the complete thread.","comments":[{"id":50444343,"author":"cmontella","created_at":"2026-11-10T18:38:26.000Z","text":"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.\nNothing 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.\nBut maybe with AI this could work, I dunno.\nWhat'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.\nIt'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.\nAnyway, 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!","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":7,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50444343"},{"id":50443879,"author":"jrmann100","created_at":"2026-11-10T18:05:40.000Z","text":"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].\n[0] https://deno.com/blog/cloudflare","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":1,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50443879"},{"id":50444392,"author":"yakkomajuri","created_at":"2026-11-10T18:42:19.000Z","text":"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).\nSteve and Tom also individually have some of the best blogs out on the web.\nI wish them all the best with whatever comes next. I'm pretty sure they'll all do great things.","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":4,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50444392"},{"id":50444332,"author":"Zambyte","created_at":"2026-11-10T18:37:46.000Z","text":"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?","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":5,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50444332"},{"id":50444320,"author":"simonw","created_at":"2026-11-10T18:36:56.000Z","text":"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.\nI'm definitely looking forward to seeing the code in February when they open source it.","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50444320"},{"id":50449155,"author":"brightbed","created_at":"2026-11-11T02:37:40.000Z","text":"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.","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50449155"},{"id":50445837,"author":"seanw265","created_at":"2026-11-10T20:27:06.000Z","text":"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.\nI 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.\nFor 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.\nI'm happy to personally help anyone who is looking to migrate.\n[0]: https://www.easel.sh","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":1,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50445837"},{"id":50443988,"author":"hardwaregeek","created_at":"2026-11-10T18:14:02.000Z","text":"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?","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":3,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50443988"},{"id":50444412,"author":"samwho","created_at":"2026-11-10T18:44:02.000Z","text":"Loved what Steve and the team at Val Town were building from the very start. So sad to see this news.\nI 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.","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50444412"},{"id":50446471,"author":"fcjr","created_at":"2026-11-10T21:21:37.000Z","text":"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!)","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50446471"},{"id":50445727,"author":"plesiv","created_at":"2026-11-10T20:16:53.000Z","text":"Steve is incredibly thoughtful about the art of programming. He has written a lot of insightful commentary over the years. A highly recommended read.\nSteve inspired us to build a val.town-like platform Gitlip (https://gitlip.com/) in early 2025. We quietly stopped working on it about a year ago because it was difficult to get paying customers.","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50445727"},{"id":50444658,"author":"tom-in-july","created_at":"2026-11-10T19:01:11.000Z","text":"Goodbye, Val Town...\nhttps://juli--01a1c6ce5cec761daadca9a5a6624b49.web.val.run/\nEver since you were esm.town, you were a lovely little platform for the fun side of the web.","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50444658"},{"id":50453161,"author":"andsoitis","created_at":"2026-11-11T13:29:07.000Z","text":"Val Town's investor update July / Aug 2026: https://stevekrouse.com/syndicated/val-town-2026-july","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453161"},{"id":50449418,"author":"QuantumAtom","created_at":"2026-11-11T03:23:12.000Z","text":"If Steve is reading this, you should be proud for taking the leap. No matter what, I'm sure there are wonderful memories of working at Val Town and sometimes an end can be the start of an amazing beginning.","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50449418"},{"id":50451898,"author":"asim","created_at":"2026-11-11T10:47:29.000Z","text":"Reminds me of the docker days. Literally my only point of reference now. Containers were moving so fast. It wasn't clear where to lay down your foundations or territory. Every week things were changing. I think AI is in that blisteringly fast space where things are changing so fast it's hard to know where the value accretion lies. If you weren't one of the ones attracting massive amounts of funding building models and becoming the AWS of the industry then you were small chum fighting for plankton and getting swallowed whole by whales.","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50451898"},{"id":50445249,"author":"jborichevskiy","created_at":"2026-11-10T19:40:43.000Z","text":"I'm gonna miss it. It was such a solid place for a v0.5 of something where I get hosting, a db, subdomains, logging, and more right off the bat.\nThank you for a wonderful service!","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50445249"},{"id":50447887,"author":"changetheY","created_at":"2026-11-10T23:40:20.000Z","text":"I applied for a job at Val Town. Steve was very kind and took more time with the rejection than he needed to... I was always super puzzled at why they didnt focus on the Zapier/Make audience - In the era of agentic coding you could turn a zap or Make scenario or n8n workflow into a val and pay a fraction of the cost.","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50447887"},{"id":50446747,"author":"dizzard","created_at":"2026-11-10T21:46:17.000Z","text":"This is a bummer. Val.town was an inspiration for my own open source work on personal apps platforms.","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50446747"},{"id":50445272,"author":"koolala","created_at":"2026-11-10T19:41:56.000Z","text":"We still badly need a replacement for Glitch.com. There are no free dynamic server hosts anymore.","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":1,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50445272"},{"id":50444524,"author":"alabhyajindal","created_at":"2026-11-10T18:52:01.000Z","text":"Sad to hear this, big fan of val.town since the early days.\nI'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.","parent_id":50443427,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50444524"}]}