Case Study - Push-to-deploy hosting on Google Cloud

Overview

Hosting platforms have settled into two extremes: opinionated abstractions that hide the cloud entirely, or raw cloud consoles that demand a full platform team. Appentic sits in between. It's a PaaS that gives every developer an isolated Google Cloud project, with their own services, their own database, and their own region, all behind a workflow that feels like pushing to GitHub and seeing the result live in under a minute.

We built the platform end-to-end. The control plane handles GitHub App OAuth, project provisioning, deployment orchestration, and resource sizing across small/medium/large/huge tiers. Every user gets a dedicated GCP project that's bootstrapped on first sign-in, with per-project service accounts and minimal IAM roles, so tenancy is enforced at the cloud level rather than just in the database.

The product surface covers the everyday tasks of running an app: push-to-deploy from GitHub, managed PostgreSQL with auto-injected credentials, environment variables and secrets via Secret Manager, automatic TLS and custom domains, real-time log streaming via SSE, a web-based xterm.js shell, deployment history with one-click rollback, and a built-in metrics dashboard powered by Cloud Monitoring. A metering and reconciliation worker tracks usage records for per-second billing.

Appentic runs on Feather (Flask + HTMX + Tailwind) with Vite islands for the interactive bits like the terminal, log stream, and ECharts dashboards. The whole stack is dark-first by design and built to be operable by a solo developer.

What we did