Val Town Newsletter 23

Steve Krouse on

🥳 Happy 2025! Last year, our product grew from a JavaScript playground to a stable FaaS (Functions as a Service) platform that thousands of engineers use in personal and professional contexts. Some highlights from 2024:

We have big plans for 2025. By the end of this year, we aim to be a mature cloud platform that serious engineering organizations use for core infrastructure. Here’s some of the highlights:

  • Projects – groups of vals, files folders – with forks & 3-ways merges (currently in private beta)
  • Scalable infra & usage-based billing
  • Team accounts for companies to collaborate
  • Improvements to Discovery, Search, Townie, Observability
  • Continuing to fast-follow with LLMs
  • SOC 2

We have two new additions to the Val Town team! Sophie is a designer, programmer, and artist, who just moved from Berlin to join us here in Brooklyn. She’s best-known for a viral app she made as a teenager, but most recently worked with Nike and Delivery Hero. Charmaine is a technical product manager, with a deep background in developer tools. She’s worked at Snapchat, Unity Labs, and Microsoft. We’re thrilled to have them both on board.

Val Projects Beta

Vals are great for small projects, but what if you want to build something bigger?

Introducing Val Projects, a new way to organize multiple vals, files, and folders into a single place. Where a Val Town Val is like a GitHub Gist, a Val Town Project is like a GitHub Repo.

Val Projects Example

Projects support:

  • Static assets, like images, videos, CSS, HTML, and more
  • Multiple files and folders
  • Scoped environment variables (that code outside the project can’t access)

Projects will soon support:

  • Branches, forking, pull requests, and three-way merges
  • Townie, with the ability to understand and edit multiple files

Projects are currently in private beta. We’re looking for more passionate Val Town users to try it out and give feedback. If you’re a Pro user, please reach out to steve@val.town, and we’ll add you to the beta.

Templates

“What can I do with Val Town?” We get this question a lot, so we made a page to help answer it.

Val Town Templates

Check it out and see if it sparks any ideas for you! Maybe you’ll find a val that’s perfect for your needs and you can fork it and make it your own. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, let us know. If you want to submit a val to be included, we’d love that too!

Upgraded to Deno 2

Deno 2 is out, and Val Town is now running it. We’re currently on Deno v2.1.2, but you can always check which version we’re running here.

In addition to some performance and security upgrades, Deno 2 also includes a couple exciting features:

  • process and Buffer are now globally available, which means you don’t have to import them anymore, which increases compatibility with Node.js code (example)
  • WebAssembly imports are supported out-of-the-box (example)

Updated pricing

We made three changes to our pricing:

  1. We now have a yearly plan for $100! This is a 20% discount on our monthly plan 🥳
  2. We’ve explicitly listed custom domains on the Pro plan, with a limit of 10
  3. We’ve changed the val runs limits from per minute to per day. Now you get:
    • Free: 100k runs / day
    • Pro: 1m runs / day
Val Town Pricing

One final word to the wise: we plan to increase our pricing soon, but existing customers will keep the same price, so sign up soon!

Blogs, podcasts, and livestreams

There’s been a lot of great content about Val Town recently, a podcast, a livestream, 5 blogs, and (unfortunately) 2 post-mortems:

Other updates

  • The logged-in Val Town homepage is now the dashboard, which shows your recent vals and projects. You can find the old homepage at val.town/home.
  • We updated val Run & Save buttons to be easier to find, and provide more immediate feedback

🛣️ Roadmap

  • Val Projects
  • Faster & scalable runtime
  • Observability upgrades: searchable & filterable logs and traces
  • Metrics to track your usage and limits
  • New Explore page for discovering vals
  • Improved code search
  • Comments on pull requests
  • Team accounts
  • Ability to follow a Val Town user
  • SOC2 compliance
  • …and much more!

Please make feature requests and vote on what you’d like to see next.

🌟 Community vals

Edit this page