Today, we are introducing a new credits payment system for Townie, our AI coding assistant. Townie is now pay-per-use. Here's the upside:

1. You can use Townie as much as you want – no limits
2. Townie is now priced independently from Val Town Pro, which makes it cheaper for casual Townie users
3. Townie becomes sustainable
4. We at Val Town get a clearer signal about how much to invest in making Townie better

We charge a 50% markup on top of raw LLM costs. If you use $10 in Townie credits, Anthropic will get $6.66 and we'll get $3.33. We think this is fair, sustainable, and transparent. We don't want to be in the business of having murky limits, obfuscated credits, or unsustainable margins.

When you pay for Townie, you're telling us in the clearest way possible to continue to invest in Townie. If you don't think Townie is worth the cost, there are many wonderful AI coding alternatives that you can use with the new Val Town CLI. We want you to choose Townie on its merits, not because it's subsidized.

We think Townie is one of the best coding assistants out there. It uses agentic tool-calling, powered by Claude 4 Sonnet, to read and write your code. It can even make test HTTP calls and inspect logs & traces to see how things are working, and keep iterating from there. Paired with Val Town's instant (100ms) full-stack deploys, Townie is one of the fastest ways to create a deployed app.

We hope you give it a shot, and are very eager to hear what you think.

Start coding with Townie here: val.town/townie

ps - Townie is 100% open-source & is hosted on Val Town