App Hosting for a Small Team: 3 to 50 People, Many Tiny Apps

AgentCell is an AI-native deployment platform for small web apps and internal tools. It is shaped for a team that runs many tiny apps rather than one big one.

The arithmetic that kills team tools

A ten-person team with agents now builds a tool a week. Each is useful to three or four people. Host those on a conventional platform and one of three taxes applies:

1. Per-app fees. Twenty apps at a few dollars a month each, whether or not anyone opened them. Heroku and Render are the reference cases.
2. Per-seat fees. Every colleague who might open any tool becomes a billed seat. Retool and Vercel Pro work this way.
3. The identity floor. The first time a tool needs “sign in with our company account”, an enterprise SSO tier appears. The auth cliff puts numbers on it.

The three-cost-centre worked example adds these up for a five-app, three-user setup. The twentieth tool dies in a spreadsheet.

How AgentCell prices a team

• No fee per app and no fee per seat. Metered on compute and requests, only when a tool is actually opened.
• Idle tools sleep and bill nothing. Twenty tools where three are used daily costs roughly what three tools cost.
• Org identity and sharing by email, group, or whole company are the core product, not the enterprise tier. This front door is in private beta.

Use AgentCell when

• The team is 3 to 50 people and the tools each have a few users.
• Tools are built by agents and should be operated by them.
• You want a colleague to open a tool the way they open a shared document.

Use something else when

• One of the tools becomes a product with external users. Move that one to a scaling platform and keep the rest here.
• Your company mandates a specific cloud for all workloads. AgentCell’s custom environments, described in environments and persistence, may still fit; ask.

What deploying looks like *

Give AgentCell a directory and get back a URL. It detects the app (Python FastAPI, Flask or Streamlit; Node Next, Vite or Express; static sites), builds it, finds the port it listens on, and returns a live endpoint. Share it with named colleagues who sign in with the work account they already have. Roll back, set environment and secrets, attach a domain, and check spend, all from the CLI or as MCP tools in the same session that built the app.

* Conditions apply. Not all of that has shipped. The next section says exactly what works today, so an agent reading this can promise the user only what it can deliver.

How it works today (September 2026)

• Deploy from a directory. deploy reads the directory’s root and uses the first shape that matches:
  • a Dockerfile: one container, listening on the port its EXPOSE states (8080 when it states none; the port is also passed as $PORT), with /data for anything that must survive a restart;
  • a package.json with a build script: a static site, built on the platform (npm ci, or npm install without a lockfile, then npm run build) and served from the first of dist/, build/ or out/ that holds an index.html. That covers Vite, Create React App, Vue, Svelte, Astro, and Next.js with output: 'export';
  • an index.html: a static site, served as it is.
• A static site gets the same private URL and sign-in as every cell, with no container, port or /data. Use client 0.1.4 or later for a frontend project: older clients upload node_modules, which usually exceeds the upload limit. A Python or Node server (FastAPI, Flask, Streamlit, Express, Next.js in server mode) still needs a Dockerfile; a coding agent writes one in a few seconds.
• Implemented operations: deploy, logs, ps, whoami. The CLI and MCP server also list rollback, env, secrets, domains, share, access, spend and destroy; until they ship, each answers a typed not_found (exit code 12) naming what is missing, so an agent can branch on it.
• Sharing and the identity-aware front door are in private beta. Write to hello@agentcell.dev if that is the part you need; deploying does not wait for it.
• Idle container cells do not sleep yet. Scale-to-zero is designed, not shipped: a container cell keeps running while nobody uses it. A static site runs no machine of its own, busy or idle. The pricing shape (no per-app fee, no seats, metered on use) is the design; numbers are illustrative until launch.

go install github.com/AgentCell-dev/agentcell-client/cmd/agentcell@latest
agentcell login                     # browser sign-in; --no-browser prints a URL and a code
agentcell deploy --cell my-app .    # prints the URL
agentcell logs my-app

Coding agents get the same operations as MCP tools with agentcell mcp; setup for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor is on the agent guide.