From a conversation to an app your people can use.

Say you’ve got a pricing spreadsheet you email around every quarter. Upload it to your AI assistant and ask it to turn it into an app. A minute later there’s a real pricing app - its own web address, a proper database, a tidy interface - running on your Croft. You invite your team; they open the link, sign in once, and use it. No file to email around, no “which version is this?”, no developer, no server to set up.

That’s the whole idea: you build software by chatting, and Croft is where it lives and how you share it. Spreadsheets, forms, trackers, calculators, little internal tools - describe it, or hand over the spreadsheet, doc, or screenshot you already have, and your assistant builds it onto your croft.

A lifecycle, not a free-for-all.

Underneath the conversation, every app follows the same repeatable path: describe it to your assistant, land it on Croft’s paved road (a private server, a login, and a database - in place before any code runs), build it, govern its data and who can open it, then run and change it safely with versioning and backups. Your team gets the speed of vibe coding; the business keeps the guardrails, because they’re built into the platform rather than left to whoever wrote the prompt. We wrote up the whole vibe-coding lifecycle here →

The conversation is the workshop.

You don’t build in Croft. You build in your assistant - Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok, the same place you already think things through. Connect your croft once, and from then on “make me an app that…” ends with a working link. Change your mind next month? Open a chat: “add a column for deposits and let Sam approve them.” It fetches the code from your croft, changes it, redeploys. The app grows the way your needs grow: conversationally.

Prefer to work in code? A developer can point a coding agent like Cursor or Claude Code at the same croft over the open MCP standard - same private server, same login, same guardrails, with full control of the code. That’s the point: in one business, your non-technical people and your developers can build side by side on the same controlled platform, and every app they ship inherits the same security.

Your login, in front of everything.

Every croft comes with its own front door: enterprise-grade single sign-on for your whole workspace. Every app you build automatically lives behind it. When your assistant builds an app, the app itself never handles passwords or sign-ins - the door does. This is why a Croft app can’t leak your data through a botched login screen: there’s nothing to botch. Your people sign in once, with a passkey (Face ID, fingerprint, or their phone), and every app just knows who they are.

People, not user accounts.

The People page is a list of humans you trust: name, email, and which apps they can open. Add someone, they get an email, they’re in. Remove someone, they’re out of everything, instantly. That’s the entire admin experience. We designed it for the two moments that matter most on a team - the day someone joins and the day someone leaves - and for keeping every app’s access exactly where it should be in between.

A server with your name on it.

Under every croft is a real virtual private server - a small, capable machine that’s yours alone. It has its own address on the internet. Your apps run there. Your data lives there. We look after it: security patches, backups, monitoring, updates, all invisible. And if you ever outgrow us or just want to go it alone, your apps, their code, and their data are yours to take - packaged into a single export you can run yourself.

When it breaks.

Software breaks. Ours does too. The difference is what happens next: you tell your assistant “the booking page is showing an error”, and it reads your croft’s logs, finds the bug it wrote, fixes it, and redeploys - usually before you’ve made tea. Every deploy is reversible with one click, and every database is continuously backed up off the server. We schedule actual restore drills, because a backup nobody’s tested is just a hope.

Apps that work while you sleep.

An app doesn’t only run when someone opens it. Ask for a schedule - “email me the day’s bookings every morning at seven” - and Croft runs it on time, day after day, even after an update or a reboot. Connect your own AI and it can read, summarise, and decide, then message you when something needs you. The recurring, tedious jobs quietly handle themselves. See what automations can do →

Shared data, on your terms.

Some things belong in one place, not copied into every app - your customer list, your product catalogue, a payment or CRM account. A connector lets your apps share a data source, or reach an outside tool like Stripe or HubSpot, without the keys ever living in an app’s code. Set one up once by asking your assistant, and every app you allow can use it.

For teams, that “allow” is the point. A sensitive data source can require an admin’s approval before an app - or a particular person - is allowed to use it. So someone can build an app that asks to use the payroll connector, but it won’t touch a thing until an admin says yes. Shared data where it helps, guardrails where it matters, and a record of who connected what. More on connectors →

Want the technical detail?

Curious about the stack, the security model, and exactly how your data is handled and backed up? We’ve written it all up - plain-English, with diagrams. Read the technical & security overview →