Pay-as-you-go web apps
Publish a workspace app without a hosting plan. A published app runs on your AI credits, used as people visit it: there's no monthly fee, and an app nobody visits uses nothing.
Like any published app, it needs a hosted production database. Use your provider's pooled connection string, since several copies of your app can each open their own connections: see Database connections.
What it costs
- Your balance goes down each time usage adds up to a whole credit. The project page shows each app's usage and credits for the last 30 days.
- One balance pays for both the AI's work in your workspaces and your published apps.
- Delete an app's project and it goes offline, and stops using credits, right away.
How many apps you can publish
How many depends on whether you've bought credits or subscribe. The Publish screen tells you when you've reached the limit.
The “Made with GetLaunch” badge
Free web apps show a small “Made with GetLaunch” badge. Buying credits hides it on all your apps for a while; free credits don't.
When your credits run out
- If you've bought credits before, your apps stay online for a while, then pause. If you haven't, they pause right away.
- A paused app shows visitors a paused page. Add credits and it's back online within a few minutes.
- While your credits are used up, new AI tasks and publishes wait for a top-up too.
- A busy app can use credits faster than your balance shows. When that happens, the AI Credits page says your web apps used the balance, and the balance catches up within the hour.
What a published app can't do
The AI builds within these limits. Keep them in mind when you ask for a feature: something that works in the preview can break once published if it doesn't fit.
- Each request has to finish within a time limit, and nothing keeps running after the answer is sent: timers, queues and schedulers stop. Long jobs need to be split into steps.
- No live connections, such as WebSockets or streams that stay open. Pages that update live refresh every few seconds instead.
- A request or upload can be at most 6 MB. Larger files belong in a storage service.
- Several copies of your app may serve visitors at once, so nothing is shared in memory between requests: sessions, counters and limits live in the database. Files the app writes while running are temporary.
- Settings (environment variables) have a size limit, and a few names are reserved. The Publish screen points out either.
- The first pay-as-you-go publish of an older workspace starts with a short preparation run by the AI, free of charge.
Web app health
Runtime logs aren't available for these apps yet. Instead, the project page shows Web app health: the requests of the last 24 hours, which pages failed, how (timed out, ran out of memory, crashed, not responding, or a server error from the app's own code) and when. It's updated every 5 minutes. The AI in your workspace sees the same summary, so you can ask it to fix a failing page. See also Monitoring.
On hold
GetLaunch can put an app that breaks the Terms of Service on hold. Visitors see a paused page, and it can't be published. Email [email protected] to find out more.
Pay as you go or a hosting plan
- Each app keeps the way it was first published. Apps published with a hosting plan stay on it.
- Your own domain needs an active subscription (Starter or above).
- If your subscription ends, the projects on the plan are deleted. Your pay-as-you-go apps stay online on credits, without custom domains, only if you have no more of them than an account without a plan can keep. If you have more, they're all deleted too, so delete the ones you don't need before the plan ends. The emails before it ends tell you which applies to you.