Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

Summary

After 4 years, we’re releasing Instant 1.0! Instant turns your favorite coding agent into a full-stack app builder. And we’re fully open source. [1] Our claim is that Instant is the best backend you could use for AI-coded apps. In this post we’ll do two things. First we’ll show you a series of demos, so you can judge for yourself. Second, we’ll cover the architecture. The constraints behind a real-time, relational, and multi-tenant backend pushed us towards some interesting design choices. We built a multi-tenant database on top of Postgres, and a sync engine in Clojure. We’ll cover how all this works and what we’ve learned so far. Let’s get into it. Demos When you choose Instant you get three benefits: You can make unlimited apps and they’re never frozen. You get a sync engine, so your apps work offline, are real-time, and feel fast. And when you need more features you have built-in services: auth, file storage, presence, and streams. To get a sense of what we mean, I’ll dive into each point and show you how they look. Unlimited Apps Traditionally, when you want to host apps online you either pay for VMs, or you’re limited. Many services cap how many free apps you can make, and freeze them when they’re idle. Unfreezing can often take more than 30 seconds and sometimes a few whole minutes. We thought this sucked. So with Instant, you can spin up as many projects as you like and we’ll never freeze them. We can do this because Instant is designed to be multi-tenant. When you create a new project, we don’t spin up a VM. We just insert a few database rows in a multi-tenant instance. If your app is inactive, there are no compute or memory costs at all. And when it is active, it’s only a few kilobytes of extra RAM in overhead — as opposed to the many hundreds of megabytes required for VMs. This means you can truly create unlimited apps. In fact, the process is so efficient that we can create an app for you right inside this essay. No sign up required. If you click the but...