Want me to ping you when I write something new?
Can't decide? Ask your friendly neighborhood LLM.
EXCLUSIVEREWARDS
ZEROSPAM
ZEROSPAM
I first used ValTown in 2024.
They had a refreshing no-nonsense take on serverless functions - write your code, 0 worries about deployment/execution.
Their product was early, and they wanted people to try it - naturally, I reached out to Steve and got on a call with Andre (loved it!).
I was building “TheWallet”, a bookmark app for myself (wow so original) and needed a way to get link previews - like what you see when you paste a link on Twitter or Discord.
(enter URL -> get image, title, description)
I had a few mature choices, Zoho Catalyst and Supabase iirc - but what’s the point of side-projects if you don’t explore new platforms and paradigms while at it?
pic, steve
Today, my bookmark app is down, but the ValTown API is still up!
You can try it right now: https://dvsj-GetWebsiteMetadata.web.val.run?targetURL=https://dvsj.in (replace the targetURL if you want to)
In 2025, I redid my website, added a “subscribers” input box, where you can enter your email and I get a notification.
I built it on ValTown so I don’t need to set up a whole server:
user submits info -> it calls ValTown -> ValTown sends me a Discord message -> I check my Discord messages for all entries.
~September, I published a couple of posts. Surprisingly, they did well - one was top story on HN and the other top post on Reddit.
Which means it got a LOT of eyeballs on it, and a lot of subscribers!
The problem: The Discord message API failed for some reason!
People were entering emails, it was hitting ValTown, but Discord failed.
So I never got most of the the messages, all their emails were lost. :(
One thing I could do was check ValTown’s logs which had info on what input it got - and the emails were a part of the input.
But it showed logs only for a couple of weeks, and it was already a month before I realized Discord was failing.
Naturally, I reached out to Steve. Just straight up DM’d.
A few messages and an email later, Tom (from ValTown) had sent most of the logs over!
I was able to recover at least half the subscribers’ details.
This got me thinking: what if I’d gone with the big guns? Would I ever be able to get in touch with Google support?
What are the odds they’d read a single message, much less sift through and send logs over?
I bet on the new guys on the block, and it paid off.
Their product today is jazzed.
Hell, my old side projects are down and forgotten and abandoned, but the APIs I made for those are still live!
So, thank you, Steve, Andre, and Tom!
PS: Love this article from Steve: Pickling compute, definitely should read.
Tom’s micro and other blog posts are always a delight too.