What small software is

Small software is software made for one purpose or a few people: an RSVP list for a club, a tracker for a team, a page for an event. An AI coding agent can now write it in an afternoon. Once it works, it needs four things: a URL, a place to keep its data, a way to share it with only the right people, and no cost while nobody is using it.

A running club wants to know who is coming on Saturday and who is bringing water. A support team of five wants a page that shows who is on call this week and lets them swap shifts. A couple wants a wedding page where guests reply and choose a meal. A manager wants a tool that reads the weekly sales export and shows the same five numbers every Monday. Someone wants to try an idea over a weekend and show it to two friends.

Each of these has a handful of users, or a few hundred at most. Many are used for a few weeks and then not again.

People always had these needs. They used spreadsheets, shared documents, and form builders, or did without, because a custom app took a developer days, and nobody spends days on an RSVP list. Coding agents changed that. You describe the tool in plain words, answer a few questions, and it works on your laptop the same afternoon. Getting it from your laptop to the people it is for is where most of these projects stop.

Y Combinator's Fall 2026 Request for Startups has an entry by Pete Koomen, "A Cloud for Small Software", about that step. It defines small software as "purpose-built tools that will only ever have one or a small handful of users," and says this software is now easy to build but still hard to deploy and share, because the large clouds were built for software that has to grow to many users.

The URL lets the people it is for open the app on a phone or a laptop, with nothing to install.

The data has to last. The club's replies have to be there on Saturday, and still be there after you fix a typo and update the app. For most small apps this is one file. Some need a small database, or a place for the photos people upload.

Sharing has to reach only the right people. The on-call tracker should open for the five people on the team and nobody else. Accounts and passwords are too much for a tool five people use. Sharing should work like sharing a document: you name who can see it, and they prove they are that person.

And it should cost nothing while nobody uses it. The club tracker is busy on Friday evening and idle the rest of the week. The wedding page gets most of its visits in one month and then none. A server that runs and bills every hour of every month does not fit that pattern. Small software should stop when nobody is using it and start again on the next visit.

spawnpoint is the easiest way to bring your software online. Your agent puts the app online with one request and gets back a link. The link is private until you share it with someone's email address. They open it and type the code sent to that address. Nobody makes an account. Each app has a folder for its data that is kept when the agent updates the app, and it can get its own database or file storage when it needs them. An app that nobody has visited for a while goes to sleep, and it wakes in about half a minute when someone opens the link.