About Freestyle Serverless Deployments

Overview

Serverless Deployments run Node.js web applications with automatic scaling, wildcard subdomains, and framework detection. Deploy from Git, code snippets, or tarballs via API. They are used to host Next.js websites, Hono servers, Expo servers and anything else TypeScript or JavaScript.

Features

API-First

No CLI or dashboard required. Create, update, and manage deployments entirely through the API. This makes Freestyle deployments easy to integrate into your own products—AI agents can deploy apps, platforms can offer hosting to their users.

Sub-Second Deploys

For deployments without a build step, we aim to go from API call to live production URL in under one second. This works even with node modules—deploy an Express server with dependencies and it's running instantly. This is possible because deployments aren't container-based and because we cache your dependencies across deploys.

Multiple Source Types

Deploy from a Git repository (public or authenticated), a code snippet, or a tarball URL. Git is recommended for observability—you can trace deployments back to commits.

Domain Management

Freestyle handles domains for you and your users. Point your customers' custom domains at Freestyle and we provision SSL automatically. Set up wildcard certificates for preview deploys so every branch gets its own subdomain without certificate delays. For testing, any *.style.dev subdomain is available for free.

Websocket Support

Timeouts are based on the last TCP packet, not the last HTTP request. Websockets stay alive as long as you ping faster than the timeout—no workarounds needed.

Cached Modules

Include your lockfile and Freestyle installs dependencies on our end. Your upload is just your source code—typically a few megabytes instead of hundreds. Smaller bundles mean faster uploads, faster propagation to our edge, and lower costs. When we scale your deployment up, we're not copying hundreds of megabytes of dependencies around. This keeps cold starts fast and your bill low.

Framework Detection

Freestyle auto-detects and configures frameworks like Next.js, Vite, and Expo. No build configuration required for common setups. TypeScript works out of the box—no compile step needed.

Beyond Vercel and Netlify

Vercel and Netlify are built for developers deploying their own projects. They assume a human is pushing code through a CLI or connecting a GitHub repo through a dashboard.

Freestyle is built for programmatic deployment for platforms. We make it easy to manage your customers domains and code through our API. We've completely decoupled domains from deployments making it easy for you to create custom flows for how you want to manage your users' apps. We've also built a deep integration with our Multi-Tenant Git service so you can manage their deployments alongside their code repositories.

This matters when you're building a product that deploys on behalf of users—an AI coding assistant that ships what it builds, a platform that gives each customer their own hosted app, or a tool that needs to spin up preview environments on demand. Traditional platforms rate-limit their APIs for occasional use. Freestyle expects you to deploy programmatically at scale.

When Not to Use Deployments

Serverless Deployments are for web applications that serve HTTP traffic. If your use case doesn't fit that model, consider:

One-Shot Code Execution

If you need to run code once and get a result back (not serve HTTP), use Serverless Runs. Runs are lighter weight and return results directly.

Non-Node Workloads

Deployments only support Node.js. If you need Python, Ruby, Go, or other languages, use VMs. VMs are full Linux environments that run anything.

Low-Level System Access

Deployments don't expose SSH, systemd, or filesystem persistence. If you need to install system packages, run background daemons, or persist files across restarts, use VMs.

Browser Automation

If you need a browser for scraping or testing, use VMs with a browser integration. Deployments don't include browsers.