Quick: An internal hosting platform for the AI era

Daniel Beauchamp and Alex Pilon on an internal platform built around a single observation: at Shopify, sharing an internal project had become harder than building one. Quick removes the deploy step entirely. You upload a folder of HTML and your site is live, with no frameworks, deploy pipelines, or config files. Since launching in July 2025 it has grown to more than 50,000 sites, and over half the company has created at least one.

The implementation is deliberately dull. Sites are folders in Google Cloud Storage buckets, gcsfuse mounts the buckets so NGINX can serve them as ordinary files, a wildcard config maps hostnames to folders, and an Identity-Aware Proxy means every request arrives already authenticated as a Shopify employee. The whole thing runs on one VM for about $200 a month. Because identity is handled at the edge, they could add shared backend services on top: a database, file uploads, LLM access, data warehouse queries, WebSockets.

The AI angle is about timing rather than design. AI wasn’t why we built it, but it’s a big part of why it took off: models got good enough that people in any discipline could generate a working site from a prompt, and Quick gave them somewhere to put it. That now runs the other way too, with quick init giving a coding agent the skills to use the platform’s APIs directly. The claim they end on is cultural, that it has completely changed the culture of how we build and share. See also Shopify’s agentic harness work.