About and trust
An agent can do everything except move money.
That single sentence is the product. Everything else — the API shape, the free tier, the wallet, the colour of a button — follows from it.
Why the invariant, and not a policy
Plenty of providers say an agent "shouldn't" spend without approval. Cloudflare's own registrar documentation puts the responsibility on the developer to design a flow that will not buy domains unsupervised. That is a reasonable thing to write and a bad thing to depend on, because it means the guarantee lives in your prompt rather than in our server.
Here it lives in our server. Every debit in the system goes through one function. There is no second path, no "just this once" flag, and no card on file to fall back to. An order either has a human authorisation artifact behind it — a paid pay-link, or a live wallet mandate with headroom — or it does not execute.
the only human step
An email with line items and a total. Approve, or close the tab. Nothing is charged and nothing is provisioned if you close the tab, and an unapproved order expires by itself.
The wallet is a mandate, not a stored card
When you approve the first purchase you can add credit and set a per-purchase cap. That cap is enforced server-side. Your agent can spend underneath it without emailing you; anything above it comes back to you as another pay-link. You can empty the wallet, lower the cap, or revoke the token at any time, and we warn you at 30 days of remaining runway rather than at zero.
This is deliberately not "a card on file with good intentions". There is no card. There is a balance you put there and a ceiling you chose, and the worst case for a compromised or confused agent is bounded by a number you picked.
What we are honest about
- We sell some domains below our own cost. .com at $10.44 against a $11.50 wholesale price is a loss of about a dollar a year, published on the pricing page and in pricing.json. It is an acquisition bet funded by hosting.
- We have not published our paid plan prices yet. Our own pricing review found the previous draft promised more included bandwidth than the price covered, so the ladder is being revised. A plan has to be break-even when a customer uses everything we sold them. Rather than publish a number and raise it later, the pricing page says plainly that it is not settled.
- Free plans throttle, they do not bill. Exceeding a free quota slows your app down. It does not produce an invoice.
- Cold starts are real. Scale-to-zero means a couple of seconds on the first request after idle. We sell a warm plan rather than pretending the cold one is fast.
- Renewals cost what registration cost. No promotional first year.
- We are not the cheapest at anything, and we do not claim to be. On domains we match the at-cost floor. If price is the only axis that matters to you, several of the providers on our comparison pages are fine choices and we say so on those pages.
What is actually built, as of 1 August 2026
Slipdock is pre-launch. There are no customers. No number on this site was measured on production traffic, no testimonial exists, and no logo belongs to anyone but us. Here is the real state.
works end to end in staging
- Workspace creation and instant scoped token
- Free private git repository
git push→ buildpack build → running app serving HTTP 200- DNS zone with A, TXT, MX and CNAME records resolving
- Quota enforcement and the dunning ladder
- Domain search and a completed registration against the registrar sandbox
- Wallet, ledger, idempotency, the
next_actionerror contract
Not done, and blocking real use
- State is ephemeral. The deployed control plane keeps data where it does not survive a restart. Postgres first, before anyone real depends on it.
- Public DNS delegation is incomplete, so the git and API hostnames we hand out do not all resolve yet.
- There is only one nameserver. Registries generally want two on distinct addresses.
- The pay-link takes no card. It marks the order paid. A real payment processor goes in before any live sale.
- No abuse screening. Free hosting plus an instant token plus a cheap domain is a complete phishing kit, and that has to be solved before the doors open, not after.
The thing that could actually kill this
Not competition — abuse. An instant token, a free host and a cheap domain is exactly what a phishing operation wants, and the real failure mode is our upstream registrar terminating us because of what somebody else did with our API.
The human payment anchor is the primary defence: every workspace that ever buys anything has a verified human payer attached to it. On top of that, nothing gets registered before funds clear, velocity limits apply, and published hostnames are screened before they become publicly reachable. If you find something abusive hosted by us, we want to hear about it, and the reporting route will be published before we take a single live sale.
Who runs this
Slipdock is built by NativeFoundation. It is a commercial product and it intends to make money — on hosting, databases and the wallet, not on surprising you at renewal.
Leaving must always be easy
This is the second of our written principles and it ranks immediately after the money invariant, because the two are the same argument. You can export your repo, your database, your DNS zone, your billing history — and anything else we ever hold on your behalf — at any time, in a standard format, and walk away with it. No export fee, no "contact sales", no degraded export, no hostage data.
| What you have here | How you take it with you | Costs? |
|---|---|---|
| Your code | The repo is a plain git remote. git clone and you have everything, including history. | nothing |
| Your database | pg_dump, on demand, including while a workspace is suspended for non-payment. | nothing |
| Your DNS | Exports as a standard zone file. Point the domain at any nameservers you like — we do not require you to use ours. | nothing |
| Your domain | Transfer auth code on request. No fee, and no hold beyond the one ICANN mandates. | nothing |
| Your billing history | The full ledger, exportable. Every debit, with its reason. | nothing |
| Your users, if we ever hold them | With their password hashes, in a standard format. We are not in the authentication business today; if that changes, this row does not. | nothing |
Why write this down rather than just meaning it. We are an aggregator, and aggregators accrue switching cost naturally: once someone's domain, code, database and DNS all live in one place, leaving means re-integrating four things. That gravity is earned and legitimate, and we are happy to have it. Friction is different — it is a decision to make the exit worse, and every company that makes it tells itself it is protecting revenue. The moment we do that we stop being the trustworthy option, which is the only reason an agent ecosystem would pick us over an incumbent with more money.
There is also a cold-blooded version of the same point. Our buyer is an agent: it has no sunk-cost bias, no embarrassment about cancelling, and perfect recall of what we promised. It will re-run the comparison at every renewal. Lock-in does not work on it, and attempting lock-in becomes a machine-readable fact about us that outlives the customer we tried it on.
The principles this is built on
Short list, and load-bearing: a change that violates one of these is a change to what the product is, not an implementation detail.
- An agent can do everything except move money. One function in the codebase moves money and nothing else may debit the ledger.
- Leaving must always be easy. Standard-format export of everything, any time, no fee.
- Errors say what to do next. Every non-2xx carries a
next_action; a 402 is a normal step, not a failure. - Nothing is silent. No silent deletion, billing, truncation or downgrade. Given a choice between quiet convenience and loud honesty, choose loud.
- Caps are enforced, not advisory. Free limits throttle rather than bill; wallet caps are checked before money moves.
- Deterministic surfaces. Idempotency keys on every mutation, nothing requires JavaScript, the same nouns in REST, MCP and HTML.
- Prices do not bait. Renewal equals registration, always. Where we sell below cost it is documented, not hidden.