Automattic has spent two decades selling websites that arrive with a content management system attached. This week it launched something that assumes the opposite: a place to park apps that a chatbot wrote for you.
The service, Spacefast, handles the unglamorous parts of shipping a vibe-coded project, including databases, authentication, file uploads, email and analytics. Automattic soft-launched it in September and made it public on Monday.
Batuhan Icoz, who built the product out of an internal hackathon while working on the company’s messaging app Beeper, said he kept receiving links from non-technical friends who had generated projects with AI tools and had nowhere solid to put them.
An open door for rival agents
The pitch differs from Lovable and Emergent, which package both the building interface and the rails underneath it. Spacefast supplies only the rails, so users can keep working in ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor or a Git repository and deploy from there. Automattic argues that enterprises drowning in marketing-team landing pages want to consolidate rather than adopt one more walled garden.
The launch lands in a bruising year for the company. A boardroom fight briefly removed CEO Matt Mullenweg before he returned within days, the interim CFO left shortly after being appointed, and layoffs rippled across several of its properties in October. Icoz told TechCrunch that some sites will not need a CMS at all as the web changes shape, a notable admission from WordPress’ owner.
Retention is the open question. Novel AI products tend to spike and then sag, and Icoz expects churn from people who never really wanted to build anything.
