Websites

A site that runs code, not just files.

Anything past a static page needs a server somewhere: sessions, forms, a database call on page load. The two ordinary ways to have one are to rent a platform seat or to rent a box — and both of them charge you for the twenty-three hours a day nobody visits.

Priced both ways

Somewhere for the site to run.

Server-based website

A site that runs code, not just files

Anything past a static page needs a server somewhere: sessions, forms, a database call on page load. The two ordinary ways to have one are to rent a platform seat or to rent a box.

Doing it yourself

Vercel Pro$20/mo platform fee, plus $20 for each extra person who can deploy$20.00
The cheapest EC2 that can serve itt4g.nano + 8 GB disk + a public IPv4, on all month$7.36

Whichever you pick$7.36+

On SproutOS

$0.01/mo

1,000 visitors

Vercel's fee covers one deploying seat and $20 of usage credit; read-only viewers are free, but every additional person who can ship is another $20, so the bill tracks the size of the team rather than the size of the app. The EC2 box is cheaper and is yours to patch, monitor and put TLS on.

Compared with the site builders

Like Lovable, minus the trapdoor.

Like Lovable and OpenAI Sites: You describe the site and it gets built and deployed. Same shape of product, same absence of a build step you have to understand.
Minus the trapdoor: The code stays open source and lives in your own repository. The infrastructure has no way to hold it hostage, because you can take the repository and run it anywhere.
With a real backend behind it: Auth, a Postgres database, background jobs and search — not a static page with a form that emails you. That is the part these tools usually leave to somebody else.

Comparison figures are published list prices for us-east-1, read from the AWS pricing API in August 2026 and multiplied by 730 hours, and are the cheapest option each vendor offers rather than a typical bill.

Worked example

Search your iMessage history and actually find things.

iMessage search has a deservedly bad reputation. Sprout's community skills encode how top startups actually build retrieval — fine-tuned embeddings, a knowledge graph alongside the vector store, and real judgment about what to ingest — not a single embedding model pointed at a pile of text.

Sprout builds the search site and stands up the backend services behind it, cheaply, and the results are better.

How DoorDash, Instacart and Uber Eats build retrieval ↗

Getting one deployed

Start from something in the store and change it, or point SproutOS at a repository you already have. Deployments come from a GitHub Action you add to your own repository, authenticated by OIDC, so there is no token of ours living in your CI.

The deploy action →Connecting a repository →

Get started