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Frequently Asked Questions, FAQ

Dozens of frequently asked questions (or rather, let's be honest, conceivably asked questions) about Val Town. Every question and answer is hand-typed by humans on the Val Town team, believe it or not.

A val is an app in Val Town. More precisely: a val a collaborative, versioned folder of always-deployed code—like a GitHub repo that can run. Vals can be websites, APIs, MCP servers, crons/scheduled jobs, agents, slack bots, email automations and much more. Read our full docs page or watch our YouTube video to learn more.

Create a website in Val Town by adding an HTTP trigger to a file in a val. You'll instantly get a real, live URL like [solitaire-game.val.run] for your website (or link a custom domain). Use HTML, CSS, and JS or frameworks like React to create websites. Watch our YouTube video on HTTP triggers to see how to set up a website in 5 minutes.

Sending email in Val Town is trivial with the [std/email] utility from our standard library. You can send emails to yourself if you're on a Val Town Free, and to anyone on Val Town Pro. Read more, or watch our YouTube tutorial on sendig email using Val Town.

Email triggers in Val Town let you send or forward email to a val—then do whatever you want with it. Like, say you wanted to forward all customer support email to a custom val that auto-drafts replies. Read more, or watch our YouTube video on email trigger.

Cron triggers let you schedule code to run on a schedule. Create reminders, send daily/weekly/whatever-ly Slack messages, poll data, run some AI evals, et cetera. Read more, or watch our YouTube video on cron triggers.

Val Town comes with built-in SQLite and blob storage, making it very easy to store data without extra configuration. Watch our YouTube tutorials on SQLite and blob to learn more. You can also use third party databases like Supabase, Upstash, Prisma, PlanetScale, Neon Postgres, and other providers.

More or less: however you want! But here's the tl;dr:

Townie is our resident coding robot, available on Pro and Business plans (with $1 in credit for Free accounts). Val Town also plays nice with Claude Code, ChatGPT/Codex, Cursor, and most other AI (vibe) coding tools, using our plugin, MCP server, or CLI.

Yes! Claude Code works fabulously with Val Town. Claude combobulates some code and, using the Val Town MCP server, hands you back a live something.val.run URL. Or use the Val Town CLI to sync Claude's code.

Yes! Codex and ChatGPT are a shoe-in fit for Val Town. Chat churns out a bunch of code, and Val Town makes it alive.

Yes, Cursor plays nice with the Val Town agent plugin (which bundles our MCP server and skills).

[Yes], any AI agent that acts as an MCP client (i.e. you can connect MCP servers) works well with Val Town. GitHub Copilot, Kilo Code, Windsurf, Warp, Zed, et al. Or, even without MCP, you can sync a local folder of code using the Val Town CLI.

Sure does. Pretty much anything you can do on the Val Town website clicking around and typing with your fingers, your agent can do with the Val Town MCP server. Write code, run code, read/write to SQLite and blob storage, set up scheduled jobs, add an email trigger, choose a custom subdomain...and dozens more tools.

Yes, the Val Town agent plugin bundles our MCP server and skills.

Yes, the Val Town API enables programmatic access to Val Town.

Yep, the vt CLI brings Val Town to the command line.

You can and you should! Creating and hosting MCP servers is a particularly good fit for Val Town because you get a live HTTPS URL immediately that you can copy-paste in an MCP client to test. The MCP Core Maintainer team even uses Val Town to work on and test MCP.

We have a docs guide and YouTube tutorial for building an MCP server on Val Town.

Yes, you can authenticate vals like any other website or software. We wrote a docs guide explaining popular approaches, including the std/oauth utility from our standard library. For teams using Val Town Business, we recommend using Val Town Access to secure your app URLs and keep them private.

Val Town Access lets you keep your apps and tools private on Val Town. When you share a website URL created on Val Town, you might want only certain people (like your coworkers or clients) to be able to access it. Val Town Access is like the Google doc sharing permissions, but for websites and tools on Val Town. Available for Business accounts. Read more, or watch our YouTube video.

By default, code is public in Val Town. Pro and Business accounts can mark vals as private or unlisted, if you want to keep your source code to yourself. We also have Val Town Access for limiting access to URLs for vals with HTTP triggers (like websites).

For any val with an HTTP trigger, like a website or API or MCP server, you can configure a custom domain (on Pro and Business accounts) or a custom subdomain (available on Free accounts). We also have YouTube tutorials for each: custom domains & custom subdomains.

Yes, Val Town supports many web standard methods of importing code. Read our documentation on importing, or watch our YouTube tutorial to learn more.

Val Town is a very good fit for handling webhooks because you can get a live HTTPS URL immediately. Read our docs page or watch our YouTube tutorial on handling webhooks in Val Town.

Yes, you can start using Val Town on a Free account. See val.town/pricing for more detail. You can create websites and other software deployed instantly to real URLs (with custom subdomains); run cron jobs; use our MCP server and CLI with your AI agent; send yourself email, and even receive email to do an automation; and much more.

Val Town Pro is the plan for Val Town power users, like solopreneurs and builders. Subscribe to Pro for $25 per month, or $21 per month billed yearly. See val.town/pricing for more detail. Pro accounts unlock $10 per month in Townie credits, up to 10 custom domains, private vals, the ability to email anyone, and higher limits across the board.

Val Town Business is the plan for teams using Val Town to create software together. Subscribe to Business for $200 per month, or $167 per month billed yearly. See val.town/pricing for more detail. Business unlocks $100 per month in Townie credit, Val Town Access, unlimited custom domains and private vals, and more hands-on support.

Val Town is a website where you can make websites, and other software.

You and your favorite AI agent can write, run, host, and share code on Val Town. In other words, Val Town is a website/app builder, vibe coding platform, code editor, hosting provider, and automation tool. The core value prop of Val Town is a very fast feedback loop with very low infrastructure costs, meaning when you have an idea for some software (a website, a slack bot, an email reminder, an api or mcp) you can make it and share it quickly on a live URL.

Val Town was originally created by developers for developers (a.k.a. engineers, programmers). And while Val Town is still very much a developer tool, lots of non-developers are using Val Town to create software, vibe coding and/or collaborating with technical colleagues. Making software on Val Town is both convenient—doing away with the infrastructure friction of old—and fun—a place to be creative and learn. If you want to build tools and websites quickly, with public URLs to share, Val Town could be a good option for you.

There are countless other tools that overlap in some way with Val Town: hosting providers, vibe coding platforms, in-browser code editors, productivity and automation tools, and more.

Hosting providers store and/or run your code in the cloud. Val Town shines for smaller software, fast iteration speed, and collaborating with a team of both technical and nontechnical colleagues. Val Town uses the Deno runtime and emphasizes web standards, while others use custom runtimes. Some offer lower-level control over your servers than Val Town, and pricing varies widely. Hosting providers include: Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, GitHub, Vercel, Netlify, AWS Lambda, Railway, Fly.io, Heroku, Render, and Supabase.

Val Town has lots in common with other in-browser, social code editors. This class of code editor emphasizes convenience and low infra costs—just write code and share a URL. These include: Codepen, JSFiddle, CodeSandbox, RunKit, Observable, Glitch (no longer maintained).

In Val Town, you can type every last line of code by hand or delegate to an LLM. Many newer tools emphasize prompting with AI. These vibe coding platforms include: Replit, Lovable, v0, Bolt.

There are countless tools and platforms that engineering, product, and sales teams at tech companies use to stitch together internal automations, dashboards, and other tools. Val Town can complement these tools, ingesting data from them and writing data to them, including: Retool, Airtable, Notion, Google Sheets, and Zapier.

Val Town was founded by Steve Krouse and Tom MacWright in 2022. Dan Levine at Accel is Val Town's lead investor (read about our Seed round).

Today, as of September 2026, the Val Town team is: Steve, Tom, Potluck Mittal, Brent Jackson, Charlie Molthrop, and Pete Millspaugh.

We are looking for an infra engineer to join our team - come work with us!

If GitHub Gists could run
And AWS Lambda were fun

That poem still describes Val Town very well (to a certain developer audience, at least), perhaps with one small edit: replacing Gists with Repos, now that vals are full versioned folders of code rather than single files.

Val Town's mission is end-user programming, the idea that all software should be customizable by its users. We're working to get there by way of end-programmer programming, our idea that at least programmers should be able to customize their own software for now, then eventually everyone. In the era of vibe coding with AI, that eventually may be sooner than we thought!

We also believe everyone should have computational literacy and agency, in the same way they should have literacy to read and write their native language. We dream of a world where everyone shapes their software to improve their lives and communities. We believe in Seymour Papert’s vision that a well-designed programming environment ("Mathland") can make its users smarter, and strive to create such an environment. Val Town is designed to make coding intuitive, so that programming feels more like editing a spreadsheet than using an IDE. We're creating a cloud computing, collaboration, and deployment platform that's bigger than the sum of its parts. We aim to build a product that everyone uses in their personal and professional lives, starting with developers and founders.

As we grow, we also dream of supporting long-term, moonshot, open-source research – in the style of ARPA, Bell Labs, and XEROX PARC.

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