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

> A team of ten builds twenty tools for itself. Hosting priced per seat, per app, or per always-on instance punishes exactly that. AgentCell prices per use and shares by email.

Published: 2026-09-20  
Canonical: https://agentcell.dev/small-team-app-hosting  
Markdown: https://agentcell.dev/small-team-app-hosting.md

**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](/resources/vs-heroku/) and [Render](/resources/vs-render/) are the reference cases.
2. **Per-seat fees.** Every colleague who might open any tool becomes a billed seat. [Retool](/resources/vs-retool/) and [Vercel](/resources/vs-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](/resources/auth-cliff-sso/) puts numbers on it.

The [three-cost-centre worked example](/resources/stitching-paas-plus-auth-guide/) 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](/resources/environments-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](mailto: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.

```sh
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](/docs/for-ai-agents/).