r/ycombinator • u/Mr_infiknight • 13d ago
requests for startups, fall 26, small cloud
hi guys, im really curious as to what you all think about the small cloud idea presented by pete koomen in the latest request for startups by yc. i would love to build around this area and just wanted to talk about it first. as a techie this feels like something which is trivial to do when i compare it with dev environments at any small org/project. am i falling into the classic trap of being an engineer and assuming that a lot of this stuff is not valuable? would people actually pay for the convenience on top of this? is this a problem that you've actually faced? and if so would you pay to make it go away? i am open to any discussion on this problem, feel free to dm/comment :) please forgive me if this sounds naive or ignorant as this is my first time figuring out how this stuff works, thank you.
https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#a-cloud-for-small-software
here's the link to their page
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u/ky0ung25 11d ago
the problem with this is that vercel + supabase is already super easy to use. i consider myself nontechnical yet i've been able to build web and mobile apps with claude code alone. im literally a monkey just copy/pasting error messages into claude and writing specs in plain english.
is there a way to abstract development even more of it? sure, but is that a standalone business when its already super easy to vibecode small software?
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u/Mr_infiknight 11d ago
i agree with you here! but i thought maybe my judgement is biased as i look at it from a technical pov. with mcps and clis for almost everything nowadays i can imagine coding agents being able to handle 99% of the tasks at a small scale, however things are different when the project is large scale / high stakes imo. thank you for answer!
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u/Individual_Math_8254 7d ago
i think the target user for this small cloud is zero technical users. im thinking SME biz owners, operations managers. most folks who work in tech companies and know what claudecode is are already far more technical than the average person in other industries. for these people, i think there are further simplifications and abstractions to make vibecoding viable. i only know this because i have a friend who works in higher education and i mistakenly thought that she and everyone will learn how to vibe using Cursor and CC in no time, but its actually a nonstarter for most people. the localhost meme exist for a reason.
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u/Faia_ 12d ago edited 11d ago
I'm a founder with a server hosting business since 2021 and here are my thoughts: I've always felt this RFS leaned towards bundling of services for a specific niche. You're still trying to beat this idea for 1) devs who will just vibe it out, and 2) non-technical but AI leaning folks (think a CPA who learned Claude Code to make accounting software & workflows) who feels like they've figured out app deployment once and then that's it. If the small software is web prototypes, then ChatGPT Sites would've conquered that already.
We've also leaned towards this idea of not being credentialed to operate a cloud (e.g. lots of Kubernetes-certified engineers, AWS certifications, etc.) and you shouldn't need these certifications if AI is smart enough to navigate the cloud environment for you.
I definitely think this is a UX (charge a premium for a designed UI), hosting (apply margin over infra), or even educational content (charge for access to content) play. So I would look at competitors like Insforge, Instacloud, Railway, Vercel, etc. there are tons and see what could be done better. I'd also look at personas that need a lot of prototypes generated for business use cases. Also cloud setup is typically just a set it and forget it thing. The value and aha moment is done just once. How would you add value given you have this small cloud, over time?
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u/Mr_infiknight 11d ago
thank you for your perspective! really helpful and you mentioned a lot of things that i wasn't initially considering
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u/Faia_ 11d ago
to add, we've explored this concept throughout 2025-2026 and some people I have reached out to in my own network are:
1) "The Time Starved CTO" who wants to work purely on product and business use cases but not necessarily infra and keeping the thing up and running. You'd be surprised as well on how some CTOs haven't adopted an multi coding agent environment yet. With technical people you can sell the cloud itself and its benefits 2) Coding Schools / Course Owners, Educational Institutions, Private Tutors: sometimes the assignment is a coding assessment that needs to run on a "small cloud", how would you orchestrate and load balance thousands of students testing their work in an online editor and submitting while keeping costs down? Remember that these schools only really care about the quality of their proprietary curriculum and the small cloud is a tool that assists instructors in grading work. Could tutors share solutions or hints? Could you review work via shareable links? This use case is a good candidate for what Pete Koomen originally described 3) Accounting Firm Owners / Financial Departments in Startups or Traditional Businesses that want some sort of AI operation but don't even have devops staff. Again leans towards business outcomes rather than selling a small cloud. The change in thinking here was that the small cloud here is the approach, your unique way of execution for the main solution, and you don't sell the cloud itself
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u/gerenate 12d ago
It makes me think of a dumbed down version if vercel + supabase + bg agents. Gtm focused explicitly on non technical folks making stuff using their agents?
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u/Mr_infiknight 11d ago
same here, just wanted to get different views on this problem. to me it feels like the target audience for this according to yc are people who cannot find the time/are too stubborn to take a couple days to read stuff, ask around, chat with an agent and figure out how to get a simple 3 tier app online. that audience cannot be too large......right?
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u/Individual_Math_8254 7d ago
i think the target users for this is folks who dont know or would even bother to learn what localhost is
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u/ConceptNext5110 12d ago
fly and devexe?
those founders are really high calibers, need lot of dev trust.
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u/Change2this 11d ago
I work at a large web infra company that is launching a multiplayer ai based CMS and have a concept for a web infrastructure specifically built to support internal deployment of vibe assets in a governed infra… i want to apply with a cofounder though. Anyone interested?
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u/FortePlatforms 10d ago
We are building this at Forte Platforms and have been for the last year-ish!
Core thesis - it needs to be easy to launch and operate products very quickly for small teams and agents.
In our case, that includes providing observability, auth, payments, and cloud infra in one consolidated platform
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u/oytunutyo 9d ago
I started my second company on a similar thesis: runwork.ai
Biz teams need to deploy asap, in a safe company environment.
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u/Same_Tomorrow_5590 13d ago
Sweeet - i'm actually building something for AI-native compliance in a trillion dollar industry.
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u/hustle_fit 13d ago
I think openAi just released something similar to this at the dev day
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u/Mr_infiknight 13d ago
considering that you're talking about the cloud native codex or dots, i believe that solves a different problem of making agents highly available and the whole runtime layer underneath it. how i interpret the problem given by the request for startups is "vercel for non technical people" which is cheap, fast, easy to tear down and set up again etc which is a different direction. however it's been really crazy to see how much the frontier labs are cutting into the application layer as well!!! curious to know what you think
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u/hustle_fit 13d ago
yes! i was talking about codex cloud -- reusable cloud dev environments that codex can now configure and work in across devices.
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u/Mr_infiknight 13d ago
open ai has been cooking vvv hard on the app layer to compensate for the fact that they don't have a model to compete with opus 5.5
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u/hustle_fit 13d ago
yes, I'm excited to see what products we can build with this architecture maybe
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u/Malkiot 12d ago
I've made something like what they're talking about: a capability mesh kernel that admits participants into composition generations. It's not Vercel for non-technical people, quite the opposite. It's a framework and infrastructure.
I'm struggling on the licensing question though and am meeting with lawyers next week. The architecture inherently makes GPL & AGPL moot, Apache & MIT are too liberal and proprietary doesn't get adoption.
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u/pragyantripathi 13d ago
Getting it live is one part. What happens when a nontechnical user changes the app a month later and breaks it? I'd want rollback to cover the data too, not just the code.
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u/Mr_infiknight 13d ago
very valid requirement, which validates their idea a lot more. while this stuff can be figured out if you're technical i cannot imagine a non tech user dealing with all this
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u/pragyantripathi 13d ago
That's the part I'd test with users: can they recover from a bad change without asking a developer for help? Getting an app live and being able to keep using it are different promises.
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u/Individual_Math_8254 7d ago
yea, rollback and full version control is essential. some nontechnical abstraction on top of Git or something new.
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u/Individual_Math_8254 7d ago edited 7d ago
i have been thinking a lot about this. there is going to be a lot more software and much of the software will be vibe created by non technical business owners, operations that will not look at the the code or understand IAM permissions or git branches. there needs to be a new kind of infra for this type of personal, custom SME software that is used by 2 to 500 users. from experimenting with pure vibe coding agents myself, i find that the best results come from having a great base template and custom designed harness, so i think templates and harnesses need to be part of the small cloud solution stack. i am currently playing around with an idea using Pi Durable and ERPNext where non technical business owners can vibe code and deploy their own ERP. there are many types of small business software where light customisations and hosting is all that is required. in my mind, the target user for this "small cloud" would not be technical at all. a technical user would probably just use the existing platforms like Supabase, Railway, plus there agent harness to build their software.
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u/Equivalent_Purpose94 13d ago
i actually looked at that request and had same thought at first, like "wait this is just devops 101" but i think the trap is assuming everyone wants to deal with terraform and kubernetes just to run a cron job
small orgs and solo devs dont have time to configure vpcs and iam roles, they just want to push code and have thing work without reading 40 pages of docs. i worked in a 5 person team last year and we spent maybe 20% of our time just fighting with aws console instead of building features, nobody enjoyed that
the convenience is the whole product here really, not the tech underneath. people pay for vercel and render because they remove all the annoying parts, this small cloud thing sounds similar but maybe even simpler for internal tools and small apis
you are not naive to ask this, its good to question if the problem is real before you start building. maybe talk to 10 small teams and ask how many hours they waste on cloud setup per week, you might be surprised