Automattic Spacefast launched on Monday. That sentence alone would not be worth your attention — except for what the company admitted while launching it.
The product is called Spacefast. It takes websites and apps built by AI — “vibe-coded”, in the term coined by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 — and puts them on the internet, with a database, file uploads, analytics and a link to share. It does not write the code. It does not offer a chat box. It is, in the company’s own words, “not an AI builder”. You bring your agent — ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or any of about nineteen supported tools — and Spacefast supplies the ground underneath it.
That is a useful product. It is also, quietly, a confession.
The admission
Batuhan İçöz, the Automattic engineer who leads Spacefast, told TechCrunch that people are now making websites with ChatGPT or Claude “as compared to deploying something on WordPress” — and that some sites “won’t need a content management system at all as the web expands”.
Read that again. The head of a new product from the company behind WordPress is telling you, on the record, that some sites may not need the thing that made his company famous. “Automattic already has good infrastructure, but we have been traditionally associated with just WordPress,” İçöz said. “I thought, why do I have to use Cloudflare when we have a CDN just as good?”
The product began, fittingly, as a hackathon project. İçöz kept receiving Vercel links from non-technical friends experimenting with vibe coding, and wondered why his own company’s infrastructure could not do the job. The project was soft-launched in September — chief executive Matt Mullenweg announced it on social media on 23 September — and opened to everyone on Monday.
The pressure
Automattic is arriving after the category’s breakout has already happened: Lovable reported $500 million in annualized revenue by June 2026, with more than 8 million users, and a $13.3 billion valuation after its August raise.
Meanwhile the web Automattic grew up on is shrinking under its feet. Websites and publishers are losing traffic to AI chatbots and summaries — TechCrunch notes that even Google saw its ad revenue growth drop. The content management system was the answer to “how do I publish on the web?” for twenty years. For a growing number of people, the answer is now “ask the chatbot”.
That is the pressure Spacefast is built under: not a rival product, but a change in what a website is for.
The bet
Spacefast’s answer is to sell the ground, not the building. It refuses the builder entirely and lets users bring whichever agent they already use. “Spacefast charges for infrastructure, not AI credits,” Automattic says, “so you don’t pay for inference twice.”
The pitch has two audiences. For individuals, it is simplicity: each project gets a “Space”, private by default, with version history, a database and a share link. Publish from a chat, drag a folder onto a page, push to Git, or run a command. It is free to start, with 20 spaces; $5 a month buys unlimited spaces; $15 covers a team.
For enterprises, the pitch is consolidation. Marketing teams are already churning out landing pages on services like Lovable, İçöz told TechCrunch, and the result is IT sprawl. “They want to consolidate and work with a company that understands the enterprise needs,” he said. “With our existing products, we have experience serving enterprise customers.”
Automattic has set Spacefast up as its own company, running on the WordPress.com infrastructure that the company says serves more than 15 billion page views a month.
The other reading
There is a less dramatic reading, and it deserves its day in court. Spacefast may be nothing more than a sensible new product line: Automattic owns hosting infrastructure, vibe coding needs hosting, and a deployment layer is a natural extension. Automattic still sells WordPress hosting and WooCommerce. İçöz’s remark about sites not needing a CMS may describe a small slice of the web — simple landing pages and mockups — rather than a verdict on WordPress’s core market.
And Spacefast is, by the company’s own framing, unfinished. A few pieces are still on the way: Automattic says built-in app authentication and shared team knowledge arrive in the coming weeks. İçöz himself expects churn, telling TechCrunch that some people who try it will turn out not to be interested in making apps at all. A launch is not a victory; it is an opening bid.
The launch also comes at a strange moment for the company. In recent months Automattic’s board forced chief executive Matt Mullenweg out, then watched him return to control within days; the rebel board was eventually replaced, the interim chief financial officer left within weeks of appointment, and in October the company began layoffs across several properties, with more cuts expected. Spacefast arrives in the middle of all that — a new product from a company still sorting out who it is.
What Automattic Spacefast means
Strip away the launch-day language and the story is simple. The company that defined the content management system era is now also selling the database, the hosting, the CDN and the link — for websites that may never touch WordPress at all.
That is not a retreat. It is a recognition, delivered by the company’s own product lead, that the web is changing shape underneath it. What Spacefast becomes — a complement to WordPress, a replacement path, or a separate business — is a question the launch does not answer.
Whether the bet pays is an open question. But the admission is already on the record. And it came from Automattic itself.
