Suppose you have the folder. An assistant wrote you something that works on your laptop, and you want your team to open it without you on the call. You go looking for somewhere to put it.

This post is a survey of what you will find, written for someone who is not an engineer and does not intend to become one. It is deliberately fair, including to the places that will do this better than we will for a while. Sploot is in private beta and there is nothing to sign into yet, so nothing here is trying to close you.

The one question worth holding onto: how many things do you have to already know before this platform will give you a URL?

First, the answer you will get from engineers

If you ask this question in public, the reply is remarkably consistent. Here is a thread on r/AI_Agents from July, where someone explains that they built a couple of agents themselves, cannot leave their computer running, and wants to move to the cloud. The top response:

dude just get a cheap vps, you’re overthinking this. digital ocean droplet or a hetzner box is like…

That is not hostile advice. For the person giving it, it is genuinely the easy path. It also assumes you can rent a Linux machine, connect to it over SSH, install a runtime, write a cron job, and notice when it stops.

The best comment in that thread is the one that gives the game away:

For two agents posting to Instagram, the provider is almost never the bottleneck. The silent failure modes and operational reliability are.

The same commenter recommends adding structured logging and a dead man’s switch before worrying about anything else. That is correct, and it is a job description. Another person describes a script that slowly consumed memory and failed quietly, which is the worst outcome available: a tool that is wrong without telling you.

Keep that in mind through everything below. Choosing a host is the easy part. Nobody in these threads is even discussing sign-in, because engineers building for themselves do not need it, and a knowledge worker building for their team needs it the moment the link leaves their laptop.

The general-purpose clouds

Vercel and Netlify grew up hosting websites and are the smoothest experience in this list if your thing is a web front end connected to a git repository. Netlify is notably the friendliest of the two to someone without git, because it has kept a drag-and-drop deploy and has folded a database into its free plan. Both will ask you to think in terms of builds and frameworks.

Railway and Render are the modern general-purpose platforms, and both are genuinely pleasant if you have used a terminal before. Render’s free tier is the most honest one in the market about what free means: it spins a free web service down after 15 minutes without traffic, and waking it back up “takes about one minute.” One minute is a long time when a colleague clicked a link and is looking at a blank page.

Fly.io is excellent technology aimed squarely at people who know what they are doing. It also no longer has a free tier. What it offers now is a trial measured in two hours of machine runtime or seven days, whichever runs out first. That is a try-before-you-buy, not a home for a tool used once a month.

Heroku deserves a mention mostly as history. It was the original “just push your code” platform and it is the reason a generation of people think deploying should be one command. Its free dynos were discontinued in November 2022. The cheapest tier today is $5 a month, and it still sleeps after 30 minutes without traffic.

Cloudflare Workers and Google Cloud Run are the two places where scale-to-zero genuinely works the way you would want: idle really does cost nothing, and they wake fast. Both ask for a mental model that is a real barrier. Cloud Run wants a container image. Workers wants you to think in terms of a specific runtime, and its database is a separate thing you provision on purpose.

AWS App Runner is worth flagging for a different reason. It was Amazon’s attempt at the simple option, and AWS has announced it will not accept new customers starting April 30, 2026, pointing people at Amazon ECS Express Mode instead. Existing deployments keep running. It is a reminder that “simple” tiers at big clouds are products with lifecycles, not fixtures.

The ones aimed closer to this problem

Replit is the most accessible thing in this list by a distance. You describe what you want, its agent writes it, and it hosts the result with sign-in and a database already attached. If you have not written the tool yet, this is a serious option. Its weakness for our case is that it wants to be where the software is born. Arriving with a folder somebody else’s assistant wrote is not the path it is designed around.

Val Town has moved directly at internal tools and describes itself as being for GTM and ops teams. It runs in the browser, includes storage and auth, and deploys almost instantly. If your thing is small enough to read in one screen, it is a strong fit. It is less suited to arriving with an arbitrary project directory in a language of its choosing.

Retool is the incumbent for internal tools and is genuinely good at them. It is also a different proposition: you build inside Retool, in Retool’s way, and the payoff is that permissions and data connections are solved. The cost is that what you have built is a Retool app.

The scoreboard that matters

Strip out everything except what a non-engineer has to supply, and the picture gets clearer.

Platform	You must bring	Sign-in included	Idle cost
Vercel / Netlify	A repo, or a build you understand	Netlify yes, Vercel via add-ons	Low, plan-dependent
Railway / Render	A repo and some terminal comfort	No	Render free sleeps, wakes in ~1 min
Fly.io	A Dockerfile or image, plus the CLI	No	No free tier, trial only
Heroku	A git push	Enterprise only	$5/mo minimum, sleeps at 30 min
Cloud Run	A container image	IAM, not app sign-in	True zero
Cloudflare Workers	Code in a specific runtime	Build it yourself	True zero
Replit	An idea, not a folder	Yes	Plan-dependent
Val Town	Small scripts, in the browser	Yes	Generous free tier
A cheap VPS	Linux, SSH, cron, monitoring	No	Fixed monthly, always on

Look down the sign-in column. That is the gap.

Almost nothing in the general-purpose category puts sign-in in front of your app for you. For an engineer that is correct behavior, because auth is an application concern and they will wire it themselves. For a salesperson with a commission calculator it is the difference between a tool they can use and a URL they cannot responsibly send to anyone.

What this actually costs you

The interesting cost here is not the monthly bill. Most of these are five to twenty dollars, which is nothing against the time the tool saves.

The cost is the concepts. Every row in that table has a hidden syllabus: what a repo is, what a build command is, what a container is, what a runtime is, what a cron job is, what a reverse proxy is. Each one is learnable. Together they are why the folder is still in Downloads.

And the second cost is quieter. It is the tool that got built, deployed, and then failed silently three weeks later, and nobody noticed until the numbers in a board deck were wrong. The Reddit thread is right that this, and not hosting, is the real difficulty. Any honest answer for non-engineers has to include what happens when it breaks, not just what happens when it starts.

Where Sploot is aiming

For completeness, since this is our blog: the bet is on that sign-in column plus the folder-shaped input. No repository required, sign-in with work email in front of the app before it boots, a database without asking, idle costing nothing, and an agent able to read the build logs and fix its own failed deploy.

None of that is exotic technology. Every piece exists in the platforms above. The difference is only about defaults, and defaults are the entire product when the user does not know which knobs exist.

It is not open yet, so treat that as a description of intent rather than a thing you can go do this afternoon. In the meantime, if you have a folder and a deadline, Replit and Val Town are the two on this list most likely to get you to a link today, and a Netlify drag-and-drop is the shortest path for anything that is mostly a web page.

Where do you actually put it? The clouds, read from outside