Val Town for Glitch Users

The news yesterday is that Glitch is shutting down. Val Town has always been inspired by Glitch - they paved the way for zero-configuration instantly-edited websites. It's a bummer that what brought so many people joy and was a great community for diverse communities is coming to an end.

So: where does Val Town fit into this? Depending on how you were using Glitch, we could be a new home for you. But Val Town isn't a drop-in replacement for Glitch, and I am no macabre salesperson so here's the basics:

Val Town is for TypeScript projects

We support static text files, TypeScript projects that work on the backend and the frontend, and frameworks like React. There are lots of batteries built-in: sending and receiving emails, an SQLite, blob storage, scheduling code to run, and all of the functionality unlocked by importing modules from NPM.

Glitch also supported static websites, as well as bundlers, like Vite. We don't support those things right now, so stuff won't transfer over automatically.

Val Town supports online editing and instant reload

Now that's the part where it matches: we have invested a lot of time into our editor and site so that it's easy to do everything you need to without installing any extra software. But we also support a great desktop flow with our beta vt tool, so if you like using VS Code or Cursor, there's a home for you here.

Val Town is also a startup

I've been around for a while. Startups are hard to rely on. There's no way I'm going to promise that your Val Town projects will still work in the year 2500, because we both know that I'd be lying. Like Glitch, we've raised money from venture capital and it is currently what pays our paychecks and server bills. If it runs out and we haven't become profitable or found an acquirer, that'll be curtains.

With that out of the way, I can tell you two things. First, Val Town is really efficient. From day one, we've been building on abstractions that let us run code cheaply at scale. Stuff that's magically good, like Deno, and wasn't available when Glitch was getting started. So keeping the lights on in a technical sense is not a huge concern: we aren't provisioning a whole server every time that you run a val.

And with that, we've also got a pretty long runway, given those low costs, so we've got some time to get our accounting in the black: and we fully intend to become profitable. We're currently working hard to find design partners, built out our paid offerings, and make sure that we aren't burning CPU cycles on anything unnecessary.

Give it a shot

I hope that a commonality between Glitch and Val Town is that we're both fun. So anyway, if you're leaving Glitch or just looking to tinker with code in a way that feels lightweight, casual, and joyful, give Val Town a shot.