What’s new in Playcode

Email on Playcode Cloud grows up: on paid plans, your app's emails are now really delivered - not just captured in the Mailbox.

• Deliver to verified recipients. Your own address works instantly (you

verified it when you signed up), and your team's addresses too. Add anyone else in Settings > Email - they get a verification link, and once they click it your app can reach their real inbox.

• Honest status on every message. Mailbox messages now show their real

fate: Sending, Delivered, Bounced, or Marked as spam - with the reason, so debugging "the email didn't arrive" takes one glance instead of guesswork.

• New apps send from day one. A fresh full-stack app now emails a

welcome message to its very first registered user - so you see your mail pipeline working before writing a single line of email code.

• Fair pricing. Emails to yourself and your team are always free.

Beyond your plan's monthly allowance, delivery is pay-as-you-go with credits - priced in line with the leading email APIs.

Free projects keep the full capture experience: every email lands in the Mailbox, rendered with working links, ready to test end to end.

Playcode can now build presentations, and it asks one question first: do you want a link you open in the browser and present fullscreen, or a .pptx file you download and edit? They are different things, so it settles that before writing a single slide.

The .pptx is a real one. Actual text boxes you can click and retype, real tables, real speaker notes, charts that carry their own data sheet. It opens in PowerPoint, Keynote and Google Slides, and Cyrillic, Japanese and emoji come out exactly as they went in. This is not a picture of a slide wrapped in a PowerPoint file, which is what most "export to PPTX" buttons hand you.

The more interesting version is a deck generator. Describe the presentation you rebuild every cycle - the monthly client report, the one-pager per prospect, the board update - and Playcode builds you an app that produces it. Your spreadsheet, database or CRM export goes in; finished decks come out, one or two hundred of them, on brand every time because the brand is written into the code. Next month you press the button instead of rebuilding the deck.

A few things worth knowing:

• Generating files needs a full-stack app, since a static site has nowhere to write one. Playcode will offer to set that up.
• Ask for both and you get both from one source: a browser deck to present from, plus a download. Change a slide once and both update.
• Slides use fonts that exist on the machine opening them, so nothing reflows into a substitute when you send the file to a client.

Playcode can now make audio. Ask for it in plain words and you get a file, hosted and ready to use in your project:

• Music - a background bed at an exact length. Ask for eighteen seconds and it ends on the eighteenth second, which is most of why a video reads as finished rather than assembled.
• Sound effects - short one-shots. A click, a coin, a whoosh, a notification.
• Voiceover - narration read aloud, for a walkthrough, a tutorial or an explainer.

It works in any project. A browser game can have its own soundtrack and its own effects without becoming a full-stack app, because the audio is generated on Playcode's side and your project simply receives the finished file.

Everything comes back already levelled to the loudness social platforms and browsers expect, so a clip does not arrive twice as quiet as everything else on the page and need fixing by hand.

Audio uses credits from your balance, priced by what each piece actually costs to make - so a one-second sound effect costs about what a one-second sound effect should, and you are not buying a bundle to get one noise.

On iPhone, tapping certain inputs - the answer boxes when the AI asks you a question, search fields, rename boxes - zoomed the page in. That part is normal iOS behavior for small text fields. What was not normal is that you could not get back: pinching to zoom out did nothing almost everywhere, so the app stayed magnified and unusable until you reloaded.

Two things were wrong, and both are fixed.

• Pinch-to-zoom works again across the app. The chat transcript, the message box, and every editor panel were opting out of the browser's zoom gesture - only the top bar still responded to a pinch. They now allow it, while keeping the scrolling and drag behavior they were reaching for.
• Fields no longer trigger the zoom in the first place. Text you type into is now sized so iOS leaves the page alone on focus, on phones and tablets. It is also simply easier to read.

Nothing changes on desktop.

Full-stack apps on Playcode Cloud now send email out of the box - no provider signup, no API token, no DNS setup.

• Zero configuration. Password resets, verification emails, order

notifications: your app's email code just works. Playcode provisions the credentials automatically when your app is created.

• The Mailbox panel. Every email your app sends appears in the editor's

new Mailbox panel within seconds - rendered exactly as a recipient would see it, with working links. Trigger a password reset, click the link in the captured email, and complete the flow end to end without leaving Playcode.

• Safe by default. New apps run in capture mode: emails are stored and

shown to you, never delivered to real inboxes - so you can build and test freely. Real delivery to your users is coming next.

• API keys, done properly. The new Settings > API keys page manages

named keys with per-key permissions (send-only or full access), shown once at creation and revocable individually - and Settings > Email shows your sending mode and usage at a glance. A stuck loop that sends the same email over and over is paused automatically; one click resumes it.

Signing up is now one continuous flow instead of a series of popups.

• One setup journey. Answer a couple of quick questions right where you

signed up - no second dialog appearing later, no design jumps.

• Team setups land right. If you choose With my team, your company

workspace is created during setup and your first project is created inside it - together with your welcome credits. Working solo? Everything stays neatly in your personal workspace.

• Your work survives sign-in. Building something before signing up?

Your edits and drafts now survive signing in with GitHub or Microsoft, and your project is saved to your new account exactly as you left it.

Clicking Logout could quietly do nothing: the menu closed, no error appeared, and you were still signed in. It happened when Playcode was open in more than one tab - the sign-out waited on a local data cleanup that a second tab was holding, and then waited forever.

Sign-out no longer waits for anything. Your session ends the moment you click Logout, and the local cleanup happens afterwards where it cannot get in the way.

Two related gaps closed at the same time:

• Every tab. Logging out in one tab now ends the session in your other Playcode tabs too, instead of leaving them signed in with a session that no longer exists. A tab holding unsaved work stays put rather than reloading over it.
• Only your own data. Signing out used to try to clear the cached data of every account that had used the browser. It now clears only yours, so signing out of one account no longer disturbs another on a shared computer.

"How do I share projects with my team?" is the question we get most, so the Help Center now answers all of it - no support chat required:

• How to share a project - invite people by email

with Viewer, Editor, or Admin roles, manage the Access list, and use the public link. Fully rewritten for the current Share tab.

• Workspaces and teams - the difference

between your Personal workspace and a team workspace, inviting members, and granting access to a whole team at once.

• Roles and permissions - the full

reference: what each role can do in projects and workspaces, how overlapping access combines, and how invitations work.

• Move a project to another workspace -

bring existing projects into your new team workspace. Chats, data, and history travel with them; nothing needs to be recreated.

The Learn about sharing link in the editor's Share tab now lands on the rewritten guide.

If you work in a team workspace, the Home screen previously checked your personal credit balance - so it could warn "You're out of credits" even though your team workspace had plenty. Fixed:

• The right wallet. Home's composer now shows the credits of the

workspace your new project will be created in - the same number the workspace menu shows.

• The right button. "Top up" from Home adds credits to that workspace,

and team members without billing access see a note to ask a workspace admin instead of a checkout they can't complete.

• Warnings stay honest. Dismissing a low-credit warning in one

workspace no longer hides a real warning in another.

Every pending invitation in the Share popup now has a Copy invite link button. It copies the exact accept link from the invitation email, so you can send it over Slack, WhatsApp, or any other channel.

This helps when an invitation email gets caught by a spam filter or a strict corporate mail gateway: instead of re-sending the email and hoping, copy the link and deliver it yourself. The link is only visible to people who manage the invitation - the project owner and workspace admins.

Available in both the browser editor and the Cloud editor, on desktop and mobile.

When we ship a new build, Playcode offers to reload so you get it. That reload used to happen immediately - and if you had a browser project you hadn't saved yet, it went with the page.

Now the reload saves first. If you're signed in, your project is written to your account before anything else happens, and edits still syncing get a moment to land. If it can't be saved - you're signed out, for instance - Playcode asks before reloading instead of deciding for you.

Two related gaps closed at the same time:

• Other tabs. Reloading in one tab used to reload the rest instantly. A tab holding unsaved work now keeps it and waits for you.
• Closing or refreshing the page. The browser's "leave site?" warning now appears for an unsaved project on any exit, not only when moving between pages inside Playcode.

Projects created with the AI builder and Cloud projects were never affected - those save to your account continuously.

Picking a plan on the pricing page while signed out now opens a one-click sign-in right there - your chosen plan is saved server-side and checkout continues automatically the moment you're in. No more dead ends for visitors who weren't signed in, and subscriptions always land on your own account.

We also fixed a frustrating loss: if you typed a prompt and signed up mid-send, some paths could drop it. The prompt now survives sign-in everywhere - including sign-ins that reload the page - and lands back in your composer or sends as intended.

Payment flows no longer show the signup survey; it can wait until after you're building.

If your first publish failed, the project could be left unable to publish at all: pressing Publish again would stop immediately, and the project card kept showing "Publishing..." forever. That is fixed. Every publish attempt now ends in a state you can act on, so you can always fix your app and publish again.

When a publish fails its health check, we also now show you your app's own startup log with the error. That is the part that actually explains the failure: your code deploys fine, but the app's server does not come up, so the published URL never responds. Previously that log was not kept, and the deploy log looked clean because the deploy itself had succeeded.

Two related improvements: the publish progress window no longer blocks the editor, so you can keep working while a publish runs or close it if something goes wrong. And if a publish is interrupted and left behind, we now clean it up automatically instead of leaving the project stuck.

If a health check keeps failing, check that your app listens on the path set as healthcheck.path in playcode.yml, or point it at a path your app actually serves.

New subscriptions now start with monthly billing selected, so the first payment matches the monthly price shown in Playcode. Annual billing and its savings remain one click away.

Stripe Checkout also no longer requires everyone to fill in a full billing address. It asks for address details only when they are needed for the selected payment method or tax rules, while the optional business-purchase and tax-ID fields remain available.

The upgrade summary now also names Claude Opus 4.8 correctly as the default Quality model.

Sharing an editable link from a Pro workspace now works the way it should: any number of collaborators can join at the same time, and they do not need a Playcode account - opening the link is enough.

Previously, collaborators who were not signed in could be turned away with a "collaboration limit reached" message even when the project owner was on Pro. That check now runs on our servers against the project's actual plan, so it can no longer misfire.

Free projects keep the existing limit of 2 people at once, and the project owner now sees a notice when someone was turned away - the AI agent working in your project no longer counts toward that limit.

The Quality build tier now runs on Claude Opus 5 by default - Anthropic's newest Opus, with noticeably sharper reasoning on multi-step build and edit work. New chats on Quality pick it up automatically; no setting to change.

Opus 5 thinks before it answers, so expect it to spend a little longer - and a few more credits - on hard tasks than the model it replaces. Claude Opus 4.8 is still one click away if you want the leaner option for everyday pages.

Switch any time in the Choose build quality dialog, or set your account-wide default in Settings -> AI defaults.

When you switch your project's shared link from "can edit" to view-only, everyone who already has the project open now loses edit access within a second - their editor switches to a read-only state with a clear notice. Turning editing back on unlocks connected visitors just as instantly.

Previously the toggle only applied to people who opened the link *after* the change: visitors who were already connected could keep typing until they reloaded the page, which made the setting look broken.

Opening a shared project link without signing in now gives you a way to browse the whole project, not just the files the owner happened to leave open.

The project menu has a new Files entry under View. It opens the file tree in a panel on the left - click any file to open it, exactly like the project's members do. Close the panel with the x in its corner and reopen it from the menu any time.

On read-only links the tree is view-only: you can open files, split the editor, and copy paths, but options that would change the project - creating, renaming, moving, or deleting files - are not shown. Links that allow editing keep the full set.

Kimi K3, Moonshot's flagship model, is now available in the Choose build quality dialog. It brings a 1M-token context window, always-on reasoning, and vision - so it can hold a very large project in context, think through multi-step changes, and read the screenshots or mockups you attach.

Pick it per chat like any other model, or set it as your account-wide default in Settings -> AI defaults. It is a strong fit for large builds where the whole codebase matters.

The Quality build tier now runs on Claude Opus 4.8 by default - our strongest all-round model for building and editing apps. New chats on Quality pick it up automatically; no setting to change.

Prefer a different model? Every option is still one click away in the Choose build quality dialog, and your account-wide default lives in Settings -> AI defaults.

The model you pick in the Choose build quality dialog now applies to that chat only. Open another chat, pick a different model, and run them side by side - one choice no longer follows you across every conversation.

Your account-wide defaults still live in Settings -> AI defaults, and the Set as my default row in the dialog now promotes your current models too, along with mode, effort, and context.

Published browser projects are now served from yourproject.playcode.site (previously on playcode.io). The new address shows up in the editor and dashboard, ready to copy and share.

If you shared an older playcode.io project link, visitors now see a short notice pointing them to the new .site address - reshare the new link wherever you posted the old one. Custom domains you've connected are unaffected and keep working as-is.

Converting a browser project to a Cloud full-stack app no longer fails when the project carries a large media library.

Projects with many hundreds of images could get stuck at the import step with an unhelpful error, and retrying or restarting the project computer never helped. The importer now transfers big asset sets reliably, and if anything does go wrong during a conversion, the error now names the actual cause instead of a generic failure - so the AI can fix it or route it to us with real detail.

Your signed-in home is rebuilt. Instead of a grid of files with a second, weaker prompt box, Home is now the place you build: a short greeting and the exact same composer you use inside the editor. From the very first screen you can attach files, use your voice, and pick your model and effort - no more stripped-down starter prompt.

• One composer everywhere. The box on Home and the box in the editor are the same tool. Whatever you can do in a chat, you can do the moment you arrive.
• Always know where your message goes. A small target chip on the composer shows whether your prompt will start a new project or continue an existing one. If you have a single project, it points there by default; one tap switches it - so a quick change request never spawns an empty project by accident.
• A project sidebar on every screen. Your projects, their chats, and folders now live in one collapsible sidebar. Open any project or jump straight to a past chat in a single click, drag a project into a folder, and reorder folders to taste. It stays put as you move between Home and the editor, so you never lose your place.
• A template gallery when you want it. "Or start from a template" opens a browsable gallery of ready-made site templates, with coding templates - React, Vue, plain JavaScript, and more - one click away. It is opt-in and never gets in the way of just describing what you want.
• A dedicated Archive. Archived projects have their own page with bulk restore, keeping your active project list clean.
• An editor that earns its chrome. A brand-new project opens clean and quiet. Share, Publish, and other controls appear as your project becomes real - once you have actually built something worth sharing - so the toolbar teaches you the workflow instead of overwhelming you on day one.

Old links to your dashboard bring you straight to the new Home, so nothing you had bookmarked breaks.

Cloud publishing got a stronger guarantee: Publish deploys the exact code that is in your workspace at the moment you press the button - every time, no matter what the AI has been doing with Git behind the scenes.

Previously, if the AI organized its work into a Git branch, a publish could quietly ship an older version of your app, or fail repeatedly with a cryptic Git error that retrying never fixed. That whole class of problems is gone:

• What you see is what ships. Publish captures your current workspace state as a single immutable version - unsaved edits included - and deploys exactly that. Branches, background commits, and Git bookkeeping can no longer change what goes live.
• Every publish shows its source. The publish dialog and history now identify each attempt by its branch and version - so "what exactly is live right now?" always has a clear answer, for you and for the AI.
• Honest errors instead of retry loops. In the rare case your workspace is genuinely out of sync with the published history, Publish stops before touching production and explains what happened in plain words - your live site stays untouched, and the AI can see the same explanation and fix the mismatch for you.

On desktop, the editor no longer carries a top navigation bar. The space it used to take now belongs to your work.

• The project menu moved into the panel row. Rename, settings, and everything you used to reach for up top now sit right next to your tabs, where the rest of your project controls live.
• Publish rides the preview toolbar. The Publish button is now on the preview, exactly where you are already looking when you are ready to ship.
• A taller canvas and a calmer screen. Fewer bars competing for attention means more room for your code and your live preview, and the controls you need are next to the work instead of parked at the top.

Nothing was taken away - every action still has a home, just a better one. On phones and tablets the familiar top bar stays, so smaller screens are unchanged.

The template gallery is now fully stocked. Open "Start from a template" and you land in a browsable library of ready-made starting points - more than 50 of them - so you rarely have to begin from a blank screen.

• Site templates for landing pages, portfolios, and other static sites you can publish as-is and then reshape by describing the changes you want.
• Coding starters for full-stack apps - React, Vue, plain JavaScript, and more - including clean Empty starters for when you want the framework without any demo content.
• Ready in every language. The whole gallery is translated, so template names and descriptions read naturally across all of Playcode's supported languages.

Pick one and you are in the editor with a working project in a single click.

The top of the sidebar now holds a workspace switcher. Your personal space and any team workspaces you belong to are one click apart, and the switcher always shows which one you are working in.

Your account controls moved in behind it - profile, plan, and workspace settings now live under the switcher instead of being scattered around the screen. One tidy corner tells you who you are and where you are building, and gets you between workspaces without hunting for a menu.

On desktop, each project in the sidebar now shows a thumbnail - a screenshot of the project itself - so you recognize the one you want by sight instead of reading down a list of names.

Hover a project and a larger preview pops up, giving you a fuller look before you open it. Finding the right project across a long list is now a glance, not a hunt.

The project sidebar is now resizable. Drag its edge to make it as wide or as narrow as you like, from a slim strip to a roomy panel. Double-click the edge to snap back to the default width.

Playcode remembers the width you chose and brings it back every time you return, on every screen.