The page is a bit sparse ;)
What will the pricing be after the beta? And what are you exactly offering? Only a database or also authentication or storage?
Can you maybe compare it to something established like Supabase?
replies(1):
Specific is a platform for building backend APIs and services entirely through natural-language specifications and tests, without writing code. We then automatically turn your specs into a working system and deploy it for you, along with any infrastructure needed.
We know a lot of developers who have already adopted spec-driven development to focus on high-level design and let coding agents take care of implementation. We are attempting to take this even further by making the specs themselves the source of truth. Of course, we can’t blindly trust coding agents to follow the spec, so we also support adding tests that will run to ensure the system behaves as expected and to avoid regressions.
There is so much ground to cover, so we are focusing on a smaller set of initial features that in our experience should cover a large portion of backends:
- An HTTP server for each project. Authentication can be added by simply stating in the spec how you want to protect your endpoint.
- A database automatically spun up and schema configured if the spec indicates persistence is needed.
- External APIs can be called. You can even link out to API docs in your specs.
You currently can’t see the generated code, but we are working on enabling it. Of course, we don’t claim any ownership of the generated code and will gladly let you export it and continue building elsewhere.
Specific is free to try and we are really eager to hear your feedback on it!
Try it here: https://app.specific.dev
Pricing is still to be determined. I imagine we will charge for infra usage (processing, storage, etc) in line with other providers like Supabase. We will also charge per-seat for developing inside Specific, which will likely be a fixed price with some token usage limit.
As for what's part of the beta, we currently offer hosting for the API and processing of requests, as well as a database to back it. We are planning on expanding that to support more use cases like background jobs, cron jobs, and object storage.
We don't offer built-in authentication and aren't planning to at this point. That's because we think there are much better providers (like Auth0, Clerk, WorkOS) that you can easily integrate in your Specific app by just specifying it!
That's the main difference to something like Supabase. We provide the infra automatically for your app to do what you need it to, but aren't opinionated around user-facing aspects like authentication. We also have the opportunity to be quite a bit more flexible. Building integrations with external APIs on Supabase for example often requires writing edge functions. In Specific, you can simply make it part of your specification.