# Specific

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/specific/ · added 2026-11-06 · updated 2026-11-06

**In short.** Specific (Cloud platform for AI coding agents, Sweden): Live with paid plans and 38 releases this year, November 2026. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: 2 founders; Y Combinator lists a team size of 2 in November 2026. Launched 10 November 2025; still running.

Cloud platform for AI coding agents · Sweden · AI-native · team of 2 to 10 · still running · group: Developer tools and coding agents

- Outcome: Live with paid plans and 38 releases this year, November 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: E; no revenue figure)
- Launch: 10 November 2025; months from launch to the outcome: 12
- Team: 2 founders; Y Combinator lists a team size of 2 in November 2026
- Outside funding: Y Combinator (Fall 2025), 20VC, BLAST and other investors named by the company; amount not published
- Main factor: Built for agents
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 1, capital needed 3
- Tags: AI-native, Small team, Funded, Running, B2B, Developer tools

Links:

- Visit specific.dev: https://specific.dev/

**The product.** A cloud platform that an AI coding agent operates by itself. The agent declares web services, workers, cron jobs, a Postgres database, file storage and Temporal workflows in one config file, runs the whole stack locally with one command, and deploys it to production with another. The company lists a free plan and paid plans from US$25 a month plus usage.

**Why it worked.** Coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex can write an app, but the founders say they struggle to run, deploy and maintain it, because hosting tools were made for people who click through dashboards. Specific gives the agent a command-line tool, documentation inside the binary and an account the agent can create without a human.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

Specific is a platform as a service, a cloud service that runs a customer's code and database so the customer does not manage servers. It is built for coding agents, AI programs such as Claude Code that write and run code in a terminal on a developer's request. The agent describes the infrastructure in a file called specific.hcl, tests it with specific dev and ships it with specific deploy.

Fabian Lindfors, who was a tech lead at Stripe for three years, and Iman Radjavi founded it in Stockholm in 2025 and went through Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch. Their launch post of 10 November 2025 described a different first product: their own agent that generates a backend from a natural-language prompt, offered to AI app builders such as Natively, with a waitlist for a private beta. On 31 March 2026 the changelog says the CLI was rebuilt so that the customer's own agent can use it end to end, and that is the product sold today.

No revenue figure was found. The evidence is that the product is live, that the pricing page lists paid plans, and that the changelog shows 38 dated releases from February to November 2026. Y Combinator lists 2 people.

## Pricing

Specific prices on 6 November 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free |  | 0 | 3 projects, 0.25 vCPU and 512 MB per service, 512 MB database |
| Pro |  | 25 | includes US$25 usage credits; unlimited projects, preview environments, custom domains |
| Scale |  | 299 | includes US$299 usage credits; SSO membership, protected internal apps, 30-day retention |
| Enterprise | custom | custom | bring your own cloud, on-premises, SAML and OIDC |

Each paid plan fee includes the same amount in usage credits; usage beyond that is billed by the hour or by the gigabyte (for example US$0.025 an hour for a service with 1 vCPU and 2 GB of memory, US$0.15 per database compute unit and hour). No yearly price is shown. The page offers funded startups up to US$10,000 in credits.

## How much revenue does Specific make? The numbers, graded

A two-founder, venture-backed hosting platform for coding agents, live with paid plans in November 2026, with no published revenue

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Status, November 2026 | live, with self-serve paid plans | C | Pricing page and changelog read on 6 November 2026. The latest changelog entry, 5 November 2026, adds projected bills and usage email alerts for paid plans. | [2, 4] |
| Revenue | not published | E | No payment-processor profile, founder statement or filing with a revenue figure was found. | [5] |
| Founded | 2025, Stockholm, Sweden | C | Y Combinator company page. | [5] |
| Founders | Fabian Lindfors and Iman Radjavi | C | About page and Y Combinator page. Lindfors spent three years at Stripe; Radjavi four years at startups including Fever and Braive. | [3, 5] |
| Team size, November 2026 | 2 | C | Y Combinator page: "Specific has 2 employees based in Stockholm, Sweden." The careers page says the company is looking for engineers. | [5] |
| Funding | Y Combinator Fall 2025, 20VC, BLAST, Inception Fund, Florent Venture Partners, Amino Capital and angels | C | Investors as listed on the about page. No amount is published in a downloaded source. | [3] |
| Launch post | 10 November 2025, 155 votes on Y Combinator Launches | C | The post offered a private beta from a waitlist. The vote count was read on 6 November 2026. | [6] |
| Change of product | 31 March 2026: CLI rebuilt for coding agents | C | Changelog entry "Built for coding agents". The 2025 launch post described Specific's own backend-building agent reached through an MCP server. | [4, 6] |
| Releases in the changelog, 2026 | 38 dated entries, 18 February to 5 November 2026 | C | Counted on this page from the changelog. | [4] |
| Paid plan prices | Pro US$25 a month, Scale US$299 a month, plus usage | C | Pricing page. Each fee includes the same amount of usage credits. | [2] |
| Agent sign-up without a human | since 21 September 2026 | C | An agent can register with specific login --agent, deploy one free project, and a person must claim it within 48 hours or it is deleted. The blog says this uses WorkOS agent registration. | [4, 7] |
| Time from launch post to the November 2026 status | 12 months | calc | Calculated: 10 November 2025 to November 2026. | [4, 6] |

How to read this table: grade C is the company's own statement on its site or on its Y Combinator pages. A "calc" value was computed on this page from rows above it. No revenue figure exists, so the story is grade E.

## When did Specific launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From a waitlist for a backend-generating agent to a hosting platform that agents use by themselves, in 12 months. Each entry carries its grade.

- **2025** (grade C [5]): Fabian Lindfors and Iman Radjavi found Specific in Stockholm and join Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch.
- **10 November 2025** (grade C [6]): Launch post: an agent that builds and deploys backends from natural language, first for AI app builders such as Natively. A waitlist for a private beta.
- **18 February 2026** (grade C [4]): First dated changelog entry: string interpolation in the specific.hcl config file.
- **31 March 2026** (grade C [4]): The CLI is rebuilt so that a coding agent can sign in, run a local environment and deploy by itself.
- **1 April and 4 May 2026** (grade C [4]): Temporal workflow inspector and billing upgrades, then a usage section and protected environments for internal apps.
- **21 September 2026** (grade C [4, 7]): Agents can deploy without a human account, and a referral program gives usage credits.
- **5 November 2026** (grade C [4]): Projected bills and usage email alerts for paid plans.

## Why did Specific work?

### The agent is the user

Every step is a terminal command with text output, so an agent can do it without a browser. The blog shows a Claude Code session that goes from an empty folder to a public URL; the CLI writes instructions into CLAUDE.md, Cursor rules or AGENTS.md so the agent knows the tool.

### Documentation inside the binary

The specific docs command prints documentation that matches the installed version, so the agent does not have to guess the config format from its training data.

### Building blocks, not a framework

There is no SDK. The app reads plain environment variables, and the config file declares Postgres, storage, services and Temporal workflows. The home page says this avoids platform lock-in.

### A free tier the agent can open

An unclaimed agent account can hold one free project for 48 hours. A person who wants to keep it claims it and later pays for usage.

## How it was built

These details come from the company's own pages. They are grade C.

- A CLI installed with a shell script, with the commands init, dev, check, deploy, status and login --agent.
- Infrastructure is declared in one HCL configuration file, specific.hcl, which the agent writes.
- Managed Postgres with pgvector, real-time sync, branching for preview environments and Reshape for zero-downtime migrations.
- S3-compatible object storage, and durable workflows powered by Temporal.
- Agent registration through WorkOS. The company's own website runs on Specific.

Sources: [1, 4, 7, 2]

## Who tried this before Specific, and why did they fail?

Four companies in our database of failed startups sold developers a way to skip server work. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### Parse (2011 to 2016; funding US$7M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: A cloud backend for mobile and web apps: database, server logic, push notifications and login.
- Why it died: Facebook bought it in 2013 and later shut it down, while Firebase grew with Google behind it.
- Record: 

### DotCloud (2008 to 2012; funding US$18M; cause: Product/Tech Failure)

- Promise: A platform as a service that handled infrastructure so developers could write code.
- Why it died: Its internal container tool became Docker, which made the original hosting business irrelevant.
- Record: 

### AppHarbor (2011 to 2014; funding US$500K; cause: Competition)

- Promise: Deploy .NET apps from GitHub without DevOps work.
- Why it died: AWS and Azure offered broader platforms, and it was tied to one language stack.
- Record: 

### Flotype (2011 to 2014; funding US$120K; cause: Competition)

- Promise: A simple API for real-time messaging in web and mobile apps.
- Why it died: Firebase and similar services offered the same thing integrated and cheaper.
- Record: 

## What changed

All four sold a shortcut past server work to human developers, and lost to large cloud providers or to their own better idea. Specific sells the same shortcut, so it meets the same giants: the home page quotes a customer who replaced Vercel, Supabase and Google Cloud with it.

The difference is the user. A coding agent reads text, runs commands and does not want a dashboard, and the large platforms were built for people. Specific bets that the tool an agent finds easiest will win the deploy, and it makes the first deploy possible before any human signs up.

## Can one person copy Specific now?

**Verdict: Hard for one person.**

A hosting platform needs managed databases, storage, builds, security and on-call operations, and Specific has outside investors to pay for that. The idea that one person can copy is smaller: make an existing developer tool usable by coding agents, with text output, docs in the CLI and agent sign-up.

1. Pick a tool that developers set up by clicking through a dashboard.
2. Give it a CLI with plain text output and a check command for config mistakes.
3. Ship the docs inside the CLI and write the agent instruction files for Claude Code, Cursor and Codex.
4. Let an agent start a free trial without a human, with limits and an expiry.

**What is still open.** Agent-first versions of monitoring, email sending, domain setup, payments setup and database migration tools.

## What could go wrong for Specific?

- **What is not verified.** No revenue figure was found. This page looked for a payment-processor profile, a founder interview with numbers and a press report of the funding round, and found none; the Y Combinator page and the company site give no customer count. A reader could look for a funding announcement or a later founder post with usage or revenue figures.
- **The first product changed.** The November 2025 launch post described Specific's own agent that generates backends from prompts. Since March 2026 the product is infrastructure that the customer's agent drives. The pages read for this story do not say whether Specific still runs its own AI model.
- **Testimonials not checked.** The home page quotes named founders and engineers, one of whom says Specific powers tens of thousands of backends for his users' apps. These quotes were not checked with the people named.
- **Competition and dependence on agent makers.** Specific competes with Vercel, Supabase and Google Cloud, which its own testimonials name, and on this site it is closest to Metorial, another infrastructure layer for AI agents. Its demand depends on coding agents from Anthropic, Cursor and OpenAI, whose makers could ship their own hosting; the blog walks through Claude Code, Cursor and Codex.

## Sources

1. Specific home page: The cloud platform built for coding agents, read 6 November 2026 — https://specific.dev/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the product, the building blocks and the testimonials.
2. Specific pricing page, read 6 November 2026 — https://specific.dev/pricing (grade C). Read in full. Source for the plans and usage prices.
3. Specific about page: Why we're building Specific — https://specific.dev/about (grade C). Read in full. Source for the founders' background and the investors.
4. Specific changelog, 18 February to 5 November 2026 — https://specific.dev/changelog (grade C). Read in full. Source for the release dates, the agent CLI change and the billing features.
5. Y Combinator company page: Specific — https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/specific (grade C). Read in full, including the page description. Source for the founding year, location, batch and team size of 2.
6. Y Combinator Launches, 10 November 2025: Specific: production-ready backends from natural language — https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Onu-specific-production-ready-backends-from-natural-language (grade C). Read in full. The founders' launch post. Source for the first product, the waitlist and the vote count.
7. Specific blog, Iman Radjavi, 26 September 2026: Let Your Coding Agent Deploy Without Creating an Account First — https://specific.dev/blog/deploy-with-coding-agents-no-account (grade C). Read in full. Source for the CLI commands, the agent instruction files and WorkOS agent registration.
8. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.

Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run Specific? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: Specific).