Automattic opened Spacefast to everyone on Monday, a hosting service that lets ChatGPT, Claude and Cursor publish what they build, with a free tier that allows 20 Spaces and a $5-per-month Go plan that raises the cap to 100.

Anyone who has asked an AI assistant to build a page or small app then faces the same question: where does it live, who can see it, and what does it cost to keep online? Spacefast gives each project a Space, a hosted address with its own sharing controls and version history, and answers with a private link and a ready database, but a hands-on tester also documented a setup link that works like an admin credential, a five-second limit on scheduled jobs and documentation that contradicted its own project template.

Spacefast Opened Monday After September Soft Launch and Boardroom Turmoil

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, announced Spacefast on Nov. 9 as a new company within Automattic. The service soft-launched about seven weeks earlier: CEO Matt Mullenweg said in a post dated Sept. 23 that the soft launch happened the day before, ahead of an Automattic board meeting, according to a wp-content report.

The launch follows a rough stretch for the company. TechCrunch reported that Automattic's board tried to oust Mullenweg in September, that the attempt failed and the board was replaced, and that layoffs had begun by Oct. 21 across several teams.

What Does Spacefast Do That ChatGPT or Claude Cannot Do Alone?

Spacefast does not build anything itself. Its site states that "Spacefast is not an AI builder," and describes a publishing and hosting layer that gives whichever AI a user already has the skills, tools and infrastructure to build and deploy.

Automattic's launch release says Spacefast pre-answers the setup questions an agent would normally ask, supplies building guidance and includes a database. When the user asks to publish, the agent returns a private link in the chat, and team comments left on that page can be turned into fixes by the agent. The release names ChatGPT, Claude, Muse, Grok Bot, OpenClaw and Hermes, plus the coding agents Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, and lists official plugins for Claude, ChatGPT and Grok Bot. Any other AI can connect through an API, a command-line tool or MCP.

The closest comparison for Claude users is a Claude artifact. Tester Casey Burridge found that an artifact lives on claude.ai as a single page that republishing replaces, while a Spacefast Space gets its own address or custom domain and can hold static sites, framework builds and full apps with a database and logins, with every publish saved as a version that can be rolled back. He concluded that artifacts suit quick sharing among people already on Claude, and Spacefast suits standalone sites.

Agent Reads Setup Link, Then Publishes Through Chat, Git, CLI, API or MCP

The default onboarding path is a prompt the user pastes into an agent, telling it to fetch a link and follow the instructions inside. The link returns directions written for the agent, covering sign-in, publishing, checking the result and reporting errors.

Spacefast's site lists four ways to publish: an agent chat, drag-and-drop upload of a folder or zip, a Git integration in which pushes to the main branch deploy to production and other branches get preview links, and a command-line tool. Supported frameworks include Next.js, TanStack Start, Astro and PHP, and the launch release adds Vite.

MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the standard that lets an AI agent call external tools through one common interface. Anthropic introduced it in November 2024, OpenAI adopted it in March 2025, and Anthropic donated it to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation in December 2025.

Under the hood, Burridge reported that Spacefast's app runtime gives each app a MySQL database, logins, file storage, email and scheduled jobs, all configured from one file, with database tables declared in the app's code and created at publish time. Every Space also has a full WordPress installation behind it, while static sites are served in front and never touch it. Mullenweg has said the service uses WP Cloud for the database, authentication, uploads, email and Akismet spam protection.

Automattic says the infrastructure handles more than 15 billion page views a month, a company claim that the release does not break down. Because Spacefast is not an AI builder, the inference bill appears to stay with whichever assistant a user already pays for, and the release says users "only pay to publish and run what they build."

Free Plan Allows 20 Spaces; $5 Go Plan Adds 100 Spaces and Hourly Backups

Spacefast's pricing page lists four tiers. Personal costs $0 with no card, includes $1 of usage per month, 20 Spaces and 20 custom domains, and allows commercial use. Go costs $5 per month and adds $5 of monthly usage, 100 Spaces, 100 custom domains, hourly database backups, datacenter selection and email support.

Pro costs $15 per month and adds $15 of usage, 500 Spaces, team roles and wildcard domains, with up to five members free and $15 per month for each additional member. Enterprise adds single sign-on, subteams, an egress firewall, log drains and a service-level agreement at custom pricing. The page does not state overage rates once included usage runs out.

Launch coverage does not agree on every figure. Automattic's release describes Go as including unlimited Spaces and Pro as $15 per month per member, while the pricing page lists 100 Spaces for Go and charges per member only beyond five, so buyers should check the live page before committing. Unclaimed Spaces expire about 33 hours and 20 minutes after creation or their last file-changing publish, capped at 30 days, while claimed Spaces stay live until unpublished.

Leaving is not uniform. The site says static sites can usually move to another host as-is, but apps built on Spacefast's runtimes need code changes and their data is exported separately. That trade-off is the one cloud platforms have long carried: the more a host runs for you, the harder the application is to move.

Hands-On Tester Hit Five-Second Scheduled Runs and Docs That Contradicted Template

Burridge built a live tracker of AI plugins on Spacefast using Claude Code and found a hard ceiling: each scheduled run gets about five seconds, and fetching a single page from WordPress.org takes about three. His sweep therefore reads one page per run and catches up over later runs.

The project template Spacefast generated told Claude that apps cannot make outbound web requests, while the documentation said they can. Local testing also required a cookie the docs did not mention, which he found by reading the command-line tool's source, and the cron scheduler appeared broken enough that he filed a bug report. These are one tester's experiences from a review published weeks before the official launch, and Automattic may have changed the behavior since.

Setup Link Works as Admin Credential, and Anonymous Publishing Invites Abuse

Burridge reported that redeeming the setup link gives the agent admin rights over the team through an API key that lasts up to 30 days, while the link itself expires about 15 minutes after creation. Claude Code's safety layer also blocked the command-line setup, and the workaround was Spacefast's Claude Code plugin, which signs in through a browser-based OAuth login. Automattic says users choose what the agent can access and do, with approval checks for sensitive actions.

Privacy defaults matter because exposure is the documented failure of AI-built apps. In May 2025, 170 of 1,645 web apps created with Lovable had an issue exposing personal information. Spacefast's pages are private by default, and the site says the URL alone grants no access, with share links that can be password-protected and a separate search-indexing setting.

Anonymous publishing cuts the other way. A user can publish a first site without an account and has a six-hour window to claim it. Security researchers have found AI web builders fueling a rise in realistic phishing sites, and RedAccess reported phishing pages impersonating brands such as Bank of America and FedEx hosted on AI-platform domains. The launch release and pricing page do not describe how Spacefast screens anonymous publishes for fraud.

The comment-to-fix feature adds a second risk class. Prompt injection hides instructions in content a model later processes, and the UK's National Cyber Security Centre said in 2023 that it may be "an inherent issue with LLM technology." Comments left by teammates or clients become text that flows into an agent with publishing rights, and Wikipedia's account lists least privilege and human approval of sensitive actions as the recommended controls. A May 2026 NSA report said MCP's "rapid proliferation has outpaced the development of its security model." Automattic's materials describe approval checks but not how comment text is kept apart from agent instructions.

Founder Built Spacefast in Radical Speed Month While Mullenweg Pitches It as Future

Batuhan İçöz built the first version of Spacefast during Radical Speed Month, an internal Automattic initiative, and joined the company through its acquisition of Texts. TechCrunch reported that the project was first called Stattic, that he previously worked on Beeper, and that it grew from watching non-technical friends send him Vercel links while they explored vibe coding.

Mullenweg announced the soft launch by saying the team had been "cooking what I think is the future of WordPress and AI." He also raised the possibility that rising data center costs could force Automattic to limit signups to prioritize WordPress VIP customers, which he framed as a possibility rather than a policy.

The bet fits his public stance on AI. In an earlier interview, Mullenweg said open source code supplies training data for AI models, and he predicted that within five years most code contributions could be AI-assisted. Automattic's April post argued that WordPress should become the operating system of the agentic web, citing about 43% of all websites, over 60% of the known CMS market and more than 61,000 free plugins in the official directory.

Spacefast Competes With Lovable and Emergent by Letting Users Pick Their Own Agent

TechCrunch described Lovable and Emergent as rivals that sell both an interface and the infrastructure for vibe-coded apps, with Spacefast taking a more open approach. İçöz argues that choice of agent is the advantage, while TechCrunch noted that some users may prefer someone else make those choices for them.

For companies, the pitch is control over IT sprawl as marketing teams build landing pages on outside services. Automattic says VIP and Pressable customers can connect to existing sites with no new vendor approval, and Spacefast can draw on Automattic products for analytics, WordPress integration and WooCommerce shops.

Spacefast follows a sequence of agent-focused moves. WordPress.com launched read-only MCP access in October 2025 and added write access on March 20, 2026, and Automattic released Studio Code, a command-line agent built on Anthropic's Claude, in public beta on April 27.

Automattic lists built-in app authentication, transactional email and shared team knowledge, including skill files, design systems and playbooks, as coming soon. Burridge's review already described logins and email in the runtime configuration, so the status of those features is worth confirming in the documentation.

Free Tier Suits Prototypes; Production Apps Need Limit and Credential Checks

Spacefast makes it cheap to turn an AI-built page into a private, shareable link, and the free tier is enough to test whether the workflow fits. Before moving a production app onto it, readers should confirm the live pricing and overage terms, check whether five-second scheduled runs and outbound-request rules fit the app, treat the setup link like a password, and decide whether team comments should be able to drive an agent that can publish.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to be a developer to use Spacefast?

No, because the main path is asking an AI assistant to publish and return a link, and the site also offers drag-and-drop upload of a folder or zip. Developers can use Git pushes, a command-line tool, an API or MCP instead, and the one tester who worked through setup with a coding agent still hit permission prompts and documentation gaps along the way.

Can someone use page comments to hijack my AI agent?

That is a known class of attack called indirect prompt injection, in which hidden instructions in content an agent reads change what it does. Spacefast lets team comments be turned into fixes by an agent, and Automattic says users control what the agent can access with approval checks for sensitive actions, but its launch materials do not describe filtering of comment text.

Can I move my site off Spacefast later?

Static sites can usually move to another host as-is, and files can be downloaded from any retained version. Apps built on Spacefast's runtimes need code changes, and app data is exported separately.

Is a Spacefast site private by default?

Yes, new Spaces are private and the URL alone grants no access. Owners can invite specific people, create a share link that can be password-protected, or make a Space public, with search indexing controlled by a separate setting.