Specific
Specific deploys agent-written code to production infrastructure from a single specific.hcl file.
If your workflow already centers on Claude Code or a comparable agent, Specific removes the most annoying part of the job: the infrastructure glue between the agent and a working deployment. Per-PR copy-on-write data branching, agent-readable logs and metrics through specific query, and the September 2026 agent auth flow are the features that actually move the needle. The $25/mo Pro plan makes it cheap to test head-to-head against a Vercel + Supabase stack.
Verified 4d ago · liveness 71/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/specific
- Developers using coding agents like Claude Code who want the agent to provision infrastructure, not just write code
- Small teams shipping full-stack apps that would otherwise stitch together Vercel, Supabase and AWS
- Teams that want PR preview environments running against production-shaped, forked data
- Agent-heavy workflows where the agent queries logs and metrics to debug its own deployments
- Teams that need fine-grained IAM roles or network policies they configure themselves
- Organizations requiring on-prem or bring-your-own-cloud without an Enterprise contract
- Developers who want granular, per-component control over each piece of the stack
We scan live Reddit threads, YouTube comments, X posts, G2 reviews and other communities — and hand you an honest verdict in under a minute.
- Honest verdict, not marketing
- Real pros & cons from real users
- Attributed quotes with receipts
3 free scans · no card needed
Skip Specific if you need to hand-configure IAM roles and network policies per component, or if your billing model can't absorb per-usage metering on compute, sync-enabled Postgres and storage.
Pro and Scale include usage credits ($25 and $299 respectively) but everything past them is metered — service tiers run $0.009/hour (Tiny, 0.25 vCPU / 512 MB) to $0.62/hour (2XL, 8 vCPU / 32 GB), so a handful of
Specific's Free tier and $25/mo Pro (with $25 in included usage credits) put it alongside Supabase Pro and Vercel Pro for a solo developer or small team replacing both. Scale at $299/mo with $299 in included usage credits is where unlimited compute, internal-app auto-authentication and SSO membership management unlock — priced for a growing team, still well under enterprise PaaS contracts. Enterprise is custom and adds bring-your-own-cloud, on-prem and SAML/OIDC SSO. Funded startups can request
In short
Specific — Specific deploys agent-written code to production infrastructure from a single specific.hcl file. Best for Developers using coding agents like Claude Code who want the agent to provision infrastructure, not just write code, Small teams shipping full-stack apps that would otherwise stitch together Vercel, Supabase and AWS, Teams that want PR preview environments running against production-shaped, forked data. Free to start; paid plans from $25/mo.
What's new in Specific
Checked 4 days agoAcross the latest 10 updates: 5 changelog entries and 5 news mentions.
Self-Hosting Temporal: What You Actually Run
Specific breaks down what a self-hosted Temporal Service actually requires — four server services, persistence, visibility, upgrades, TLS.
Preview Environments With Real Data
Preview environments need their own database, buckets and volumes. Specific forks all of it per pull request.
How to Run a Temporal Worker
Temporal Cloud runs the server; you still build and host the worker. Specific turns it into one service block.
Project pausing, deeper metrics
Projects can now be paused from dashboard settings, stopping services and jobs while preserving data at storage-only cost. Adds per-route request counts, 5xx rates, and p50/p95 TTFB.
Zero-Downtime Postgres Migrations Without the Manual Steps
Reshape is built into Specific so zero-downtime Postgres migrations run by default — one database setting, phases inside every deploy.
Let Your Coding Agent Deploy Without Creating an Account First
Walkthrough of a Claude Code session that writes infrastructure, registers itself, deploys, then hands the account to the user.
Agent auth, referrals, better metrics
Coding agents can authenticate and deploy via 'specific login --agent', getting one free-tier project claimable within 48 hours. Referrals pay $100 in credits per subscribing team, up to 10.
More expressive migrations, dashboard improvements
Reshape migrations gain CHECK constraints, partial and expression indexes, and related-row update/delete control. Deployment detail page splits Build and Deploy stages.
Service alerts, usage breakdowns, preview redeploys
Alerts page covers service errors, slow responses, failed health checks and crashes, with email notifications on Pro and Scale. Paid plans get project and environment cost breakdowns.
Headless API keys, reliable local workflows
API keys can be created in user settings for CI and cloud coding agents, with full or read-only access, expiry and revocation.
What people actually say about Specific — is it worth it?
We scanned public community sources for Specific on Jul 28, 2026 and could not establish that the discussion we found is about this tool rather than something else sharing its name. Our own analysis of that scan says the posts were off-subject. Rather than publish a sentiment score built on the wrong subject, we publish nothing here and re-run the scan.
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Specific? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Declarative infrastructure for coding agents via a single specific.hcl file, with no SDKs in your app
- CLI workflow: specific dev, specific deploy, specific query, specific status
- One-command local development that spins up the full stack without Docker containers
- Autoscaling web services, background workers, cron jobs and long-running services
- Managed PostgreSQL with autoscaling, scale-to-zero and built-in schema migrations
- Point-in-time recovery and bottomless Postgres storage
- Realtime sync engine for collaborative and local-first apps, reading directly from Postgres
- Vector store for embeddings and semantic search over application data
- S3-compatible object storage, globally replicated, with zero egress fees
- Durable workflow orchestration via managed Temporal hosting
- Preview environments with copy-on-write branching of your database, buckets and volumes per pull request
- Project pausing from dashboard settings to stop services and jobs while preserving data
- Metrics for request counts, 5xx rates and p50/p95 TTFB alongside logs and workflow history
- Agent auth and deployment via specific login --agent without a pre-existing account
- Agent feedback via specific feedback and deployment retries
About Specific
Specific is a cloud platform built for coding agents. Instead of hand-wiring a Vercel project, a Supabase database and a few AWS services, you (or your agent) describe the app and its stack in one declarative file, specific.hcl, and your agent reads that file while Specific provisions what it describes. There are no SDKs in your app; the config is the contract between agent and cloud. The blocks map to real primitives: web services, background workers, cron jobs and long-running services, Postgres with autoscaling and built-in schema migrations, a realtime sync engine, a vector store for embeddings, S3-compatible storage, and durable workflows on managed Temporal. The CLI does the daily work. specific dev spins up the whole stack locally without a pile of Docker containers, specific deploy builds and rolls the change out from the command line or through GitHub, and specific query and specific status let an agent read logs, metrics and live database data to chase a root cause and ship the fix. Every pull request can get a preview environment with copy-on-write branching of your data, so an agent tests against production-shaped data rather than an empty schema. September 2026 releases added project pausing that stops services and scheduled jobs while preserving databases and files, deeper metrics with request counts, 5xx rates and p50/p95 TTFB, and agent auth via specific login --agent so a coding agent can authenticate and deploy without a pre-existing account. The buyer is a team already leaning on a coding agent and tired of being the DevOps layer between the agent and a running app. That is also the trade-off: Specific replaces several vendors at once, which is the appeal and the thing to weigh if you want granular control over each piece. Vercel plus Supabase plus a Temporal host is a real alternative, and picking Specific means accepting one opinionated abstraction across all of it.
Behind the Verdict
The pitch here is narrow and honest: your coding agent writes the code, so let it write the infrastructure too. Specific's answer is a single specific.hcl file the agent can read and edit, plus a CLI that stays in the agent's loop. That combination is why the testimonials keep repeating the same story — pointed Claude at the onboarding docs, everything worked on the first try. When to pick it: you are shipping full-stack apps and the bottleneck is no longer code generation but wiring. Postgres, storage, realtime, vectors, cron and durable workflows in one file, one deploy, with preview environments that fork your actual data per pull request. That last part is the one I would test first, because an agent debugging against production-shaped data behaves very differently from one debugging against a bare schema. When to pass: you need IAM roles you define yourself, network policies, or on-prem and bring-your-own-cloud without an Enterprise contract. Those live behind the Enterprise tier. If your team has strong opinions about each infrastructure component and enjoys owning the seams, a composable stack will feel less like friction and more like control. Cost discipline matters. Compute is billed per usage against tier tables (a Tiny service at $0.25 vCPU / 512 MB runs $0.009/hour; Postgres counts active compute units at $0.15/hour, or $0.30 with realtime sync), and Pro and Scale are credit-inclusive rather than flat — $25 and $299 per month including matching usage credits. Plenty of prototypes land inside the credits. Long-running services and sync-enabled Postgres on hot traffic will not, so instrument before you scale. The closest comparison is Vercel plus Supabase plus a Temporal host stitched together. That stack is more granular and more legible to
Researching Specific? Get your full AI stack in 60 seconds.
Free, no signup — tell us your goal and get tools matched to your budget & existing stack.
Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Specific actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
You describe the app to Claude Code, which writes specific.hcl with a web service, a Postgres database and object storage, then runs specific dev to test locally and specific deploy to ship.
Outcome: A production deployment on the Free tier with 5 projects and unlimited API requests, with a path to Pro ($25/mo) when you need custom domains and preview environments.
You enable preview environments on Pro so every pull request gets its own environment with copy-on-write data branching, and turn on partial previews so only services affected by the change get rebuilt.
Outcome: Agents and reviewers test against production-shaped data per PR instead of an empty schema, and first preview deploys are faster because they reuse work from the parent environment.
On the Scale tier you deploy internal apps that get automatic authentication and SSO-driven membership management without changing application code, then monitor them from the dashboard Alerts page.
Outcome: Internal tools ship behind enforced authentication with email alerts on service errors, slow responses and failed health checks, and no auth code was written.
Use Cases
- Deploy a full-stack web app from scratch using only natural language prompts to a coding agent.
- Spin up isolated preview environments for every GitHub PR with copy-on-write cloned production data.
- Debug production performance issues by having your agent query live logs and metrics via specific query.
- Build a real-time collaborative task board with sync, file storage and background jobs.
- Run scheduled cron jobs and durable workflows with automatic retries and state management.
- Migrate from a Vercel + Supabase combination to a single platform for both frontend and backend.
- Deploy internal tools with automatic authentication and SSO membership management on the Scale tier.
- Develop and test locally with specific dev without spinning up Docker containers.
Models Under the Hood
as of 2026-10-16
Limitations
- Specific is a cloud platform for AI coding agents, which interact with it via the specific CLI and configuration files like specific.hcl rather than an SDK in your app.
- It has Free, Pro ($25/mo including $25 usage credits), Scale ($299/mo including $299 usage credits) and Enterprise (custom) tiers, with per-usage billing beyond those credits and tier-based caps — the free tier allows 5 projects, 0.25 vCPU / 512 MB per service, 512 MB database storage, 1 GB file storage and 1-day data retention.
- On-premises deployments, bring-your-own-cloud, SAML/OIDC SSO and configurable data retention are offered only on the Enterprise tier, while unlimited compute and storage begin at Scale.
- The platform assumes you are a developer comfortable with infrastructure concepts, the CLI and configuration-as-code workflows.
as of 2026-10-04
Verification history
We have re-verified Specific 10 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
Showing the 6 most recent of 10 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Specific tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Free
$0/mo
Ideal for
Hobbyists and developers testing a coding-agent workflow on a single app before committing budget
What this tier adds
Free entry point: 5 projects, unlimited API requests and users, GitHub deploys, capped at 0.25 vCPU / 512 MB per service and 1-day data retention
Pro
$25/mo
Ideal for
Small teams running production apps with agents, who need preview environments and custom domains
What this tier adds
Adds unlimited projects, multiple environments, preview environments with GitHub integration, auto-scaling, custom domains and 7-day retention for $25/mo including $25 usage credits
Scale
$299/mo
Ideal for
Growing teams deploying internal apps that need enforced authentication and SSO membership management
What this tier adds
Removes compute and storage limits, adds internal-app auto-authentication, SSO membership management, 30-day retention, real-time log and metrics export, and priority support
Enterprise
Custom
Ideal for
Large organizations with compliance, data-residency or on-premises requirements
What this tier adds
Adds bring-your-own-cloud, on-prem deployments, configurable data retention, SAML and OIDC SSO, and dedicated support on a custom contract
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Specific's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Specific's Free tier and $25/mo Pro (with $25 in included usage credits) put it alongside Supabase Pro and Vercel Pro for a solo developer or small team replacing both. Scale at $299/mo with $299 in included usage credits is where unlimited compute, internal-app auto-authentication and SSO membership management unlock — priced for a growing team, still well under enterprise PaaS contracts. Enterprise is custom and adds bring-your-own-cloud, on-prem and SAML/OIDC SSO. Funded startups can request
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Specific — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
Point your coding agent at the Specific onboarding docs and it can get a project deployed in a single session — one customer reports it "did everything else" after being pointed at the docs. Developers running manually can go from specific dev locally to specific deploy in well under an hour, since specific.hcl replaces the usual Vercel, database and storage wiring. Agent-only setup is now
Switching to or from Specific
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From Vercel + Supabase: consolidate both into specific.hcl service, Postgres and storage blocks, then use preview environments to verify parity before cutting over.
- →From a Docker-compose local setup: replace the container stack with specific dev, which spins up the full local environment in one command.
- →From self-hosted Temporal: move workflow orchestration to Specific's managed Temporal hosting and turn the worker into a service block.
- →From manually scripted Postgres migrations: let Reshape run zero-downtime migrations inside every deploy for any language and any coding agent.
- ↗To a hyperscaler stack: Specific runs your services on its own cloud, so leaving means re-creating compute, Postgres, object storage and workflows on AWS, GCP or Azure.
- ↗To Vercel + Supabase: frontend hosting and Postgres move cleanly, but you would rebuild the specific.hcl declarations as separate platform configs.
- ↗To self-hosted Temporal: export workflow definitions and run the Temporal Service yourself, taking on the four server services, persistence, visibility, upgrades and TLS.
- ↗To a Docker-based deployment: containerize each service block and re-create Postgres, storage and real-time sync with separate vendors.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “Specific”, and we withheld 6: 6 could not be judged, because “Specific” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about Specific.
Official links
Tools that pair well with Specific
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Specific, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Refact.ai
Open-source autonomous AI coding agent that plans, executes, and deploys tasks inside VS Code and JetBrains IDEs.
Poolside AI
Poolside builds open-weight agentic coding models — Laguna XS 2.1 (33B) and Laguna S 2.1 (118B) — for code that stays inside your security
Roo Code
Roo Code is a pre-launch multi-agent AI coding assistant for VS Code, currently collecting email signups on a landing page only
Featured Head-to-Head Comparisons
Specific vs Spider Cloud
Choose Specific if you're building full-stack apps and want your AI coding agent to manage infrastructure declaratively — it's a one-stop platform replacing Vercel, Supabase, and AWS. Choose Spider Cloud if your AI agents need to fetch, crawl, or scrape web data at scale for RAG pipelines — it's purpose-built for fast, reliable extraction. They solve different problems: app deployment vs. data ingestion.
Specific vs Temporal Ai
If you need a battle-tested, open-source durable execution engine to orchestrate complex AI agents and workflows that survive failures, Temporal AI is the clear choice. For developers leveraging AI coding agents to build full-stack apps rapidly with minimal DevOps, Specific provides a streamlined, agent-friendly platform. Choose based on whether your core need is reliable workflow orchestration or turnkey application infrastructure.
Specific vs Voyage Ai
Voyage AI and Specific solve completely different problems: one is a specialized embedding API for RAG, the other is a full-stack deployment platform for AI agents. If you need high-accuracy retrieval on finance/legal documents with enterprise compliance, choose Voyage AI. If you're building apps with coding agents and want to skip DevOps, choose Specific. They are complementary, not competing.
Alternatives to Specific
View all
Refact.ai
Open-source autonomous AI coding agent that plans, executes, and deploys tasks inside VS Code and JetBrains IDEs.
Poolside AI
Poolside builds open-weight agentic coding models — Laguna XS 2.1 (33B) and Laguna S 2.1 (118B) — for code that stays inside your security
Frequently Asked Questions
Best-of guides
Used Specific? Help shape our editorial sentiment research.