blog

Someone on your team asks for a small thing. A page that reads two APIs and shows which orders are stuck. You point an agent at it and an hour later it works on your machine. Then you spend four days getting it in front of the one person who asked, and about half way through you start wondering whether it was worth it.

What the four days are actually made of

None of it is the software. The software was finished on day one. The rest is the bill for making a thing that runs on your machine into a thing that runs somewhere else, and it itemises about the same way every time.

• A container, or a buildpack, or a runtime version pinned somewhere. Something has to describe the machine your laptop already was.
• Somewhere to put it, which means an account, a project, a region and a bill.
• The secrets again. They were environment variables in a file you never committed, and now they have to exist in a second place that is not your laptop.
• The data. It read from a local database with a few rows you had seeded by hand. That database is not coming with it.
• A URL, which means DNS, which means a certificate.
• Some way to stop the whole internet opening it, which is the step that quietly turns a two-day job into a four-day one.

Every item is reasonable. Together they are a deployment, and a deployment is a fixed cost. It does not get smaller because the thing you are deploying is small.

The bill did not move when writing got cheap

This is the part that changed recently, and it changed in one direction only. Writing the code got dramatically cheaper. Putting it in front of a person did not move at all.

So the ratio inverted. The order dashboard used to be two weeks of work and two days of deployment, and nobody argued about the two days. Now it is an hour of work and two days of deployment, and the deployment is the project. That is a bad trade for anything only a handful of people will ever open, which is most of what gets built inside a company.

What people do instead

Faced with that bill for a tool three people need, most of us pick one of four things, and all four are worse than they look.

• Send a screenshot. The person cannot use it, so they keep asking you to run it.
• Run it for them on request, which makes you the tool.
• Deploy it properly, which is the four days, for something that may be abandoned in a fortnight.
• Do nothing, which is the most common answer and the reason a lot of useful internal software is never built at all.

The other way round

Almost all of that bill exists because the software was built somewhere private and has to be moved somewhere public. If the machine it was built on is already reachable, most of the list stops applying. There is nothing to describe, because the environment is the one it was built in. Nothing to move, because the dependencies, the database and the rows you seeded by hand are already there.

On reachpad that is one command. The agent works in a workspace, the app listens on a port inside it, and you expose the port.

• reachpad ports expose 3000 returns a link on app.reachpad.dev.
• Anyone signed in to reachpad who has the link can open it. No clone, no install, and no account on your machine.
• reachpad ports revoke 3000 ends it.

Then they ask for a change

They always do, and this is the half of the story that gets left out. The first version is rarely the one people keep, so the interesting question is not how you shared it, it is what the second version costs.

The link points at a port in a workspace, not at a copy of what was running when you sent it. Change the app, restart it on the same port, and the same link serves the new version. Re-running expose on a port that is already open returns the link it already has, so the person you sent it to keeps the address you gave them.

When to pay the four days anyway

Some software should be deployed properly, and pretending otherwise would be a disservice. If it takes payments, if it holds data you would have to disclose losing, if people outside your company touch it, or if it needs to stay up while you change it, then the bill at the top of this page is not overhead. It is the job.

The argument here is narrower: that bill should not be the price of finding out whether an idea was any good, and for a tool three people use it very often is.

166 hours 40 minutes of agent work, free are shared across up to 10 workspaces, and there is no card. The quickstart ends on the link you can send someone, or sharing a port covers exposing, listing and revoking in full.