Dashboard

What is Cohostly

A shared home for apps, with sharing, hosting and a few built-in services, so you can skip building those.

Think of a restaurant that rents out a kitchen. You bring the recipe, which is your app. The restaurant gives you the stove, the fridge and a table with a name card on it. You do not buy a stove. Cohostly does the same for apps.

The three jobs

  1. Hosting. Your app gets a web address. It runs when someone visits and goes to sleep when nobody does, so you are not paying for an idle machine.
  2. Sharing. You choose who can open it: only you, only people you invite, your team, anyone with a Cohostly account, anyone with the link, or the whole internet. You can change your mind at any time.
  3. Bindings. Services the platform lends to your app: a small database, AI models, access to a person's Google or Microsoft account, a way to ask a person "is this okay?" before doing something risky, and a clock that wakes your app at set times. Your app asks; the platform does the heavy and risky part, and no secret key ever sits inside your app.

What you actually install

Command line
Put an app online, share it, look after it. Runs on your own computer.
SDK
A package your app imports to find out who is visiting and to use bindings.
Skills
Instructions that teach an AI coding assistant to do both of the above.

Words we use

You will meet these words again. Here they are once, in plain language.

Project
One app on Cohostly, with a name, versions and settings.
Version
One build of your project. Every deploy makes a new one. Old ones are kept so you can go back.
Binding
A service the platform lends your app. Your app declares which ones it needs.
Visitor
Anyone opening your app. They may be signed in, or not.
Settings file
cohostly.json, a short file next to your code that says things like "this app needs a database". Most apps need none.
Account
The workspace that owns projects. People in it are an owner, an admin or a member.
Secret
A value like a password or an API key that your app needs but that must never sit in your code.

What Cohostly is not

  • It is not a place for apps that must run all day without pause. Apps sleep when idle. How apps run explains the details.
  • It is not a disk. Files an app writes while running can disappear. Keep information in the database binding instead.
  • It does not run every language. Node, Python, Go and plain websites work today.
  • It does not yet show prices. Costs are estimates, not a bill.

Good to know The platform itself (the part that runs apps) is not in this toolkit. These docs describe what you touch: the CLI, the SDK, the settings file and the behaviour you can rely on.

Next: put an app online in five minutes.