About | Ancla

The short version

Ancla grew out of a real problem. We've spent years deploying and maintaining production infrastructure — and every time, the tooling got in the way. Deploying changes shouldn't require a Kubernetes certification and a prayer.

The existing options fell into two camps. The PaaS platforms that make life easy but charge you through the nose and lock you into their ecosystem. And the "just use K8s" crowd, where you spend more time writing YAML than Python. There's nothing in between — and that gap has only gotten worse.

In February 2026, Heroku froze all new feature development. Railway eliminated its free tier and started surprising developers with bandwidth bills. Fly.io deprecated GPU support and admitted publicly that their scaling model was wrong. Render quietly added bandwidth charges. The pattern is unmistakable: platforms built on venture capital eventually optimize for investors, not developers.

We wanted both: the simplicity of Heroku with the power and transparency of running your own cluster. So we started building. Ancla is the result — a deployment platform that treats infrastructure as an implementation detail, not your full-time job. Built by people who'd rather ship code than manage servers, for people who feel the same way.

Timeline

How we
got here

2026

Ancla Prototype

Internal dogfooding on real workloads. Deployed production services, broke things, fixed them, and validated that the architecture could handle what we were asking of it.

Soon

Public Beta

Early adopters start deploying real applications. The feedback loop tightens — every rough edge gets filed down by people using it in anger.

—

General Availability

The platform Heroku should have become — built on open standards, priced predictably, and maintained by people who actually deploy software for a living.

What We Believe

Opinions we hold

Deploy should take seconds, not hours

If pushing a bug fix requires editing three config files and waiting for a 12-minute CI pipeline, something has gone wrong. The gap between "code works locally" and "code is in production" should be as small as possible.

You should be able to leave

Ancla uses standard OCI images, standard Kubernetes resources, and standard Dockerfiles. If you outgrow us or change your mind, take your containers and go. No proprietary format, no data hostage situations.

Pricing should be predictable

We don't charge per request, per GB of bandwidth, or per seat for basic features. You know your bill before the month ends. If pricing requires a calculator, the pricing is the problem.

Standards over lock-in

We build on OCI images, standard Dockerfiles, and real Kubernetes. No proprietary buildpacks, no custom runtimes, no vendor-specific abstractions. If you leave, your containers come with you.

The PaaS market failed you

In February 2026, Heroku froze all new features. Railway eliminated its free tier. Fly.io deprecated GPUs and admitted "we were wrong." Render charges for bandwidth. The pattern is clear: platforms that prioritize growth over sustainability eventually compromise on the developer experience that made them useful in the first place. We're building differently.

Roots

Built on
proven foundations

Ancla is built with Litestar, a Python web framework our team helps maintain. The task queue runs on SAQ. The ORM layer uses Advanced Alchemy. The CLI is written in Go.

Ancla is a product of SideQuest, LLC, a small group of developers who build tools for other developers. We contribute to the Python ecosystem because we use it every day, and we think giving back is the only reasonable way to work.

The name? Ancla is Spanish for "anchor." Drop anchor, your app stays put. Seemed right.

6+ Languages supported

<40s Average deploy time

99.9% Uptime SLA

0 Lines of YAML required

Credentials

Built by people who ship

Litestar Core Team Framework maintainers

No Vendor Lock-in Standard OCI images

99.9% Uptime SLA Production-grade reliability

Zero Egress Fees Predictable pricing

Stack

What we're made of

Ecosystem

We build the tools
we depend on.

We don't just use open-source software — we maintain it. The frameworks, libraries, and tools that power Ancla are projects our team actively contributes to. That means fewer black boxes and faster fixes when something breaks.

SideQuest-Group

Litestar Core team member Advanced Alchemy ORM + repository layer SAQ Async task queue Litestar Vite Frontend integration

Come build with us

Whether you're deploying your first side project or running production at scale.

Get Started View Pricing

We're infrastructure people who got tired of infrastructure.