How Netlify Is Winning The Age of AI Agents
I sat down with Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann to chat about Netlify's meteoric growth thanks to AI agents.
I’ve been using Netlify for years, and they host every app built on Converge.run. So getting Matt Biilmann (Netlify CEO) on the podcast (I kinda have one of those now) was a real pleasure.
Earlier this year I caught him on another podcast saying daily signups had jumped from 3,000 to 16,000. I planned to open with that number.
He cut me off. “Now we have passed 40,000 a day.”
A 10-year-old developer infra company added more than 13x its daily signups in just over a year. A few things I learned from the conversation:
Why Netlify was already positioned to win when ChatGPT launched, and how they pressed the advantage
How Matt coined Agent Experience (AX) in January 2025 and pivoted the whole company around it
His read on the future of Netlify and vibe coding
How they’re using AI internally to replace legacy SaaS tools (they just killed Zendesk)
They placed the bet in January 2023
Netlify was already in a great position when ChatGPT launched. They had spent almost a decade at that point building production-grade hosting infrastructure, and generally had a lot of love from the community.
When ChatGPT first launched, it could barely produce a coherent function, let alone write production code. But just a few months later, in January 2023, Matt brought a four-pillar AI strategy to the company. The fourth pillar was a single line: become the preferred platform for AIs to build on.
He told me he thought it would matter by the end of the decade. It started mattering 18 months later. So while his timing may have been off, the direction was correct.
Their built-in head start
Netlify’s predecessor, Bit Balloon, had an anonymous deploy flow since 2013. Drag a folder onto a webpage, get a live URL, claim it later if you want to keep it.
That permissionless flow happens to be exactly what an agent needs to deploy something on a user’s behalf without friction. In 2023, before Cursor and other AI coding IDEs launched, most users were generating code directly in ChatGPT, so Netlify leaned into ChatGPT plugins (remember those?) which allowed users to deploy to Netlify from ChatGPT. This became pretty popular and Matt and his team quietly started seeing a thousand new sites a day from ChatGPT alone.
Partnering with vibe-coding platforms
In November of 2024, Bolt.new launched, which I believe was the first true vibe-coding platform. Netlify partnered with them so Bolt users could click a button to deploy their app and get a link they could share. The user could later on claim that project on Netlify if they wanted to take ownership, add a custom domain, or manage it in some other way.
This drove a lot of new sites and a lot of new users. It also became the blueprint for other platforms. Netlify is now the default host for nearly every vibe-coding platform that followed.
Leaning into agents
Matt published “Introducing AX: Why Agent Experience Matters” (AX) in January 2025, before Claude Code had even launched. He went to their company kickoff in Denver and pivoted the whole company around it.
Agent experience (AX): the holistic experience AI agents will have as the user of a product or platform.
AX is still new, but the principles are becoming more standard. Matt nailed most of the principles in his original post more than 18 months ago.
Is it simple for an Agent to get access to operating a platform on behalf of a user? Are there clean, well described APIs that agents can operate? Are there machine-ready documentation and context for LLMs and agents to properly use the available platform and SDKs? Addressing the distinct needs of agents through better AX, will improve their usefulness for the benefit of the human user.
Too many companies are focusing on adding shallow AI features all over their products or building yet another AI agent. The real breakthrough will be thinking about how your customers’ favorite agents can help them derive more value from your product. This requires thinking deeply about agents as a persona your team is building and developing for.
They built primitives
Most platforms in their space are launching their own coding agent (Vercel’s V0, for example). Netlify went sideways. They launched agent runners that spin up Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI inside Netlify’s own sandbox infrastructure. They launched a database built around agent-friendly branching and migrations. They launched Netlify.ai with an anonymous deploy flow so an agent can ship a site before a human ever logs in.
The bet here is that the value isn’t in being the agent. The value is in being the substrate the agent runs on. That’s a different shape than what most of their peers are building, and partnerships with Bolt, Lovable, and Devin are the proof.
That said, they’re starting to look more and more like a coding platform themselves, especially with their recent prompt → app flow paired with the new database product. Matt walks through the difference in the episode.
They eat their own dog food
Not directly about building for agents, but a fun glimpse inside Netlify. Their CISO, who also runs support and IT, spun up a Netlify database, synced all their Zendesk tickets in, and asked Claude Code to build a UI on top of it. It mostly did the job with light engineering help. They’ve since extended it with the features they always wished Zendesk had.
So they killed their Zendesk subscription.
About half the pull requests on app.netlify.com now come from agent runners. Their HR team is shipping software. Compliance is shipping software.
The shift isn’t “AI replaces engineers.” It’s that domain experts who never could ship software are now shipping software. Inside Netlify, these teams are a handful of domain experts plus one or two engineers helping push things across the finish line.
Where this is going
The playbook is showing up in the data.
Ramp’s latest software vendor numbers put Netlify in the top 5 fastest-growing software vendors by new customer adds.
The TAM math is the part Matt keeps coming back to.
The existing dev tools market (Vercel, Cloudflare, GitHub, Netlify) is so small compared to a market that serves every white collar worker who’s about to start building software. That’s the actual bet. The 40,000 signups a day are the early signal.