When I first started really programming, my definition of “deploying” was FTP’ing a PHP file to a scripts/ directory on a HostGator site (ah, how I loved Transmit 4 from Panic).

Over the years, I discovered version control, VPSs, Heroku, AWS, Vercel, and so on. Each made me feel like I had been living like a barbarian beforehand.

Well, it’s happened again: exe.dev is now my favorite cloud / deployment platform, and I suspect it’s only just barely getting started.

exe.dev co-founder David Crawshaw (formerly co-founder and CTO of Tailscale, another wonderful “it-just-works” product) wrote a blog post about their vision that I recommend reading. It ends with this line:

So, I am building a cloud. One I actually want to use. I hope it is useful to you.

And so it is, indeed. Here’s my case for exe.dev as it stands today:

  • trivial and near-instant to spin up a new VM with a persistent disk / filesystem and all the fixins — you can just get straight to work on whatever you want
  • you pay for pooled disk, vCPUs, and memory that is shared across all your VMs (so nice for small, experimental, or personal projects where I don’t need meaningful per-project resources), and you aren’t charged per-VM (!)
  • a ton of built-in integrations, including — which may sound weird for a “cloud” — push notifications, outbound emails, and Slack notifications. Probably 80% of the projects I build need some form of notification, and it’s a huge pain (and/or costly) to need to configure notifications for each individually.
  • intelligent access controls by default — including exe.dev-powered authentication rather than the VM being on public internet by default (again: most projects want this, and you usually have to do it yourself every time — including email/SMTP setup and so on)
  • great, agent-friendly developer ergonomics and CLI
  • sensible, minimal defaults across the board
  • extremely reasonable pricing, starting at $15/month for 2 vCPUs + 4GB memory + 100GB disk, pooled across up to 50 VMs
  • and highly performant and snappy on top of all that

It’s basically my platonic ideal of “I have a idea I want to try but I don’t want it on my own computer and/or I want someone else to access it and/or it needs to be running all the time.” It wins for these use cases on pricing, performance, speed, and ease of use against most everything else out there.

Over the past couple weeks I have found myself building and deploying more software purely because I know I can just punt it up on exe.dev and not worry about anything.

I didn’t even realize I was bottlenecked by my deployment dread. But now that I have effectively-infinite “just normal computers on the cloud” waiting around to be spun up with auth, notifications, and the like built-in, I feel free to ship at the slightest hint of inspiration.

They have a docs page Why exe.dev? which explains the pitch briefly in their words, if you need more convincing.

(There’s only one thing I don’t “get” yet which is their built-in agent Shelley that comes bundled on every VM. I don’t find myself using it over my own. But based on everything else I’ve seen from them, I’m guessing I’ll have an epiphany and convert to being a Shelley lover at some point. And in the meantime it is harmless and easy to disregard.)

In my opinion, if you build software projects or play with agents… you’re doing yourself a disservice not having an exe.dev subscription sitting around as your default place to ship things. It’s just too good.

If exe.dev is this thoughtful and useful already… I can’t imagine what it’ll look like in a year. Long live exe.dev!

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