What’s new in Playcode

We reshaped the paid plans around one idea: a dollar buys the same 4 AI credits everywhere, and the plans differ in how much you get - not in what a credit costs.

• Pro is now one simple plan. $25/month, 100 credits, 3 full-stack cloud

apps, custom domains. No size picker - a heavy month is covered by top-ups.

• Meet Max (formerly Business). For people who need more of everything:

5 cloud apps, larger VMs (8 CPU · 16 GB editor), 1 TB/month bandwidth - and now with double the credits at the same prices. $100/month includes 400 credits, $200 includes 800, $400 includes 1,600, and new sizes reach $2,500/month with 10,000 credits.

• Top-ups are one rate for everyone. $1 = 4 credits on every plan, with

the same volume bonuses (+5% at $50, +10% at $100, +20% at $200).

Existing subscribers keep their current plan and price; Business subscribers get the doubled credits automatically from their next renewal.

Connecting a custom domain to a Cloud app now explains itself better - especially for root domains.

• Squarespace DNS is now recognized. If your domain runs on Squarespace

nameservers, the wizard shows the exact ALIAS record their panel expects.

• The wizard names your DNS provider. When a root domain can't point at

Playcode, the wizard now tells you which DNS service it detected and which nameservers prove it - no more guessing whether the check is right. This especially helps domains bought at Google Domains and moved to Squarespace, which often still run on Google's nameservers behind the scenes.

• Unknown providers are never a dead end. If we can't identify your DNS

host, the wizard now shows the ALIAS record to try instead of blocking you - and still recommends the www address that works everywhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Settings is now one word. Everything that used to hide in the Preferences and Appearance menus - theme, language, editor options, AI defaults - lives in a single Settings modal you can open from anywhere.

The modal is grouped by scope, so it is always clear who a setting affects:

• Project - name, archive, publish address and custom domains, plus how the project runs: watermark, live reload, SPA mode, live view delay, loop protection, and production build options. This group appears when you open Settings from inside a project.
• You - profile, appearance, editor preferences, and your AI defaults (model tier, effort, context, voice input). These follow you across all workspaces.
• Workspace - general settings, people and teams, billing and plans, usage, and the affiliate program.

Two behaviors worth knowing:

• A chat keeps whatever quality settings you give it; a new chat starts from your defaults in Settings.
• To make the current chat's setup your default, use Set as my default right in the build-quality dialog - one tap, no extra dialog.

The project menu now holds only actions. Every knob has a home in Settings.

Playcode now asks for confirmation before you increase context above Medium, switch to Ultra, or move from a stronger model to Economy.

Each dialog explains the practical trade-off without discouraging the choice. Economy highlights lower credit use and explains what to do if a complex task starts repeating; larger context and Ultra explain their higher credit use. Re-selecting the current mode, lowering context, or leaving Ultra remains immediate.

Pro mode now starts with GPT-5.6 Sol, OpenAI's flagship model for complex builds, detailed design work, and difficult debugging.

Your existing model choice is preserved if you selected one yourself. You can switch the Pro model at any time from the build-quality picker or Preferences > AI Model > Quality Model.

Background agents got a big round of polish the same day they shipped:

• Agents now build in parallel. The AI can run several build agents at once - each with its own slice of the work - instead of queueing them one after another. Big builds finish sooner.
• You can see what each task runs on. Every task now shows its agent type and model tier right in the tasks panel, and read-only helpers (research, code exploration) always use the economy model. A task never uses a more expensive tier than your chat is set to - upgrading is always your call, never the AI's.
• Research you can trust. A research agent must fetch real web sources now; if it ever answers without them, the result is clearly flagged so you know it came from memory, not the web.
• Smoother task navigation. The tasks panel has a proper header and close button, and the back button in a task returns you to wherever you came from - the chat or the list. Failed and stopped tasks say what actually happened instead of a generic line.
• Calmer credit warnings. Running low shows a quiet amber note above the chat box (dismissible), with a heads-up at 50% and 15% remaining - including on the Free plan, which previously got no warning at all. Out of credits is now a one-click "Top up" (or "Upgrade" on Free), never a red alarm.
• Clearer controls. Stopping a task is a stop square now (the old ✕ looked like "close"), task cards keep their title readable on narrow screens, your chat list shows a small spinner on any chat the AI is still working in, and undo works on file changes inside a task's transcript too.

The chat composer got a full redesign:

• One quiet frame. Softer corners, a lower profile, and every control in calm ink - the send button is the only thing that lights up.
• Notices slide out from behind. Credit warnings no longer stack a banner on top of the chat box; they dock behind it as a slim strip, so the composer always stays in front.
• Compact attachments. Files and images you attach are now small chips inside the frame instead of large preview cards.
• Little touches. A frosted-glass scroll-to-bottom button, a clearer sidebar icon, and a bit more breathing room in the header - especially on phones.

Builds on GPT-5.6 Sol (available in the Pro tier) now reuse cached context between steps, so multi-step agent runs are noticeably faster and spend fewer credits.

Why it matters. A long agent turn re-sends a lot of the same context on every step. Sol now caches that context, so the repeated parts are much cheaper - more of your credits go toward new work instead of re-processing what the agent already read.

Your teammates' names and emails now appear instantly in the People view and the share dialog - and keep working even when your connection drops.

No more waiting or blanks. Names and avatars for everyone you share a workspace or project with are kept in sync locally, so the roster renders immediately instead of blanking while it fetches. Open the People page or a share dialog offline and you still see who's who.

A workspace is no longer tied to the one person who clicked "Create".

Any number of admins. Promote as many teammates to admin as you need - every admin can manage members, sharing, settings, and billing with equal rights. There is no single "super owner" anymore; the person who created the workspace is simply its first admin.

Ownership is transferable. Handing a workspace over is now just a role change: make the new person an admin, and they can take it from there - including if the original creator later leaves the company. Playcode always keeps at least one admin in place, so a workspace can never lock itself out.

Nothing changes for your personal workspace - it stays yours.

Give a teammate Admin on a single project and they can now run it end to end.

Publish, snapshot, restore. A project admin can publish and unpublish the project, create and restore checkpoints, retry provisioning, and manage its published subdomain - without needing to be a workspace admin.

Destructive actions stay protected. Deleting or moving a project, and attaching custom domains, still require the project's creator or a workspace admin. So you can hand someone the keys to operate a project without risking that it gets erased or relocated.

We rebuilt the storage system behind Playcode Cloud - the layer that keeps your full-stack app's data and files safe while it runs.

The payoff is more predictable performance and stronger reliability, especially for apps that read and write a lot of data. Most of it is invisible by design: your app just runs more smoothly, with fewer surprises under load.

Nothing to change on your side. Existing Cloud apps get it automatically.

Pro mode now starts new chats at Extra High effort when you have not chosen a different default.

This gives the default Quality model more room to reason through multi-step build and debugging work. You can still choose Low, Medium, High, Extra High, or Max from the Intelligence setting when you want to trade speed and credit use for depth.

Claude Sonnet 5 is now the default Quality model in Playcode.

New Pro chats use Sonnet 5 for the Quality path by default. Existing users who were following the previous default move with the Quality setting automatically, so they do not need to change anything in Preferences.

Opus 4.6 remains available in the model picker for work where you explicitly want Opus.

Pro Quality mode now runs directly on Claude Opus 4.6 with extended thinking turned on. It's noticeably more stable and consistent on longer, multi-step work, and the model is shown by name in the AI Model picker and your usage history.

Nothing to change on your side - Quality just gets the upgrade. The Intelligence dial still tunes how hard it thinks per task, and Economy mode stays the fast, lightweight lane.

When you ask the AI to recreate a design from a screenshot, check how a page looks, or work with an image, it now sees the actual picture - not just a link to it.

Before, the AI could take a screenshot but sometimes couldn't really look at it, so it would capture the same page over and over without making progress. That's fixed. Now it looks once and gets to work.

What the AI can see now:

• Screenshots it takes of a live page - so it can clone a design you point it at, or check that your published site looks right.
• Images it generates or edits - it sees its own result, so it can judge it and refine instead of working blind.
• Any image you give it a link to - paste an image URL and ask the AI to describe it, match its style, or build from it.

It also accepts more image formats automatically (including AVIF) and resizes large images for you, so you don't have to convert anything first.

When Playcode's AI takes on a multi-step job (setting things up, running your tests, building, or publishing), it now tells you what it's doing in plain language as it happens, instead of showing raw technical output. You'll see what it's checking and why, like "Are there already settings files here?", and how a longer step is going, like "Tests about halfway, passing so far", so you're never left watching a blank, frozen screen.

On longer jobs the AI now works more like a teammate at the keyboard: it starts the step, keeps an eye on it, and gives you a quick read every few seconds, flagging early if something looks stuck instead of going quiet until the very end. Clearer, simpler, and written for founders, not engineers.

Sites served on your own custom domain now load over HTTP/2. Browsers can fetch many files at once over a single connection instead of requesting them one after another, which is the same modern protocol your visitors already get on Playcode subdomains.

The effect is most noticeable on mobile, where pages have many scripts and styles to load. In our mobile testing on a custom-domain site:

• Mobile Lighthouse performance: 73 → 85
• Largest Contentful Paint: 4.7s → 3.5s

No setup is needed. Every site published to a custom domain on Playcode Cloud gets this automatically.

Cloud project previews now come back much faster after they have gone idle.

For projects with a warm snapshot available, Preview can wake in about 1-2 seconds instead of waiting for a full cold start that can take about a minute. That is up to around 60x faster when you return to a recent Cloud project.

This is most visible when you are iterating on a full-stack app: open the project, wait for Preview, make a change, leave it idle, then come back later. Playcode can now resume the working project state instead of rebuilding the whole dev environment every time.

If a project needs a clean start, for example after an infrastructure update or an expired snapshot, Playcode falls back to the slower cold start path so the project still opens correctly.