Meet Acorn: A Cloud Platform for Everyone

Today, we're thrilled to unveil Acorn, a cloud platform that brings back the simplicity of early cloud computing, and provides a free computing sandbox to anyone who wants to build, deploy, explore or share software.

Our team aspired to create a public computing cloud that feels like an open-source community, where a GitHub account, not a credit card, is your starting point. A place where you can be confident everyone has an account, and you can share application images as easily as you pass around a PDF or GIF.

Acorn is available beginning today in beta. You can create an account in minutes by linking your GitHub account, and launch your first Acorn. The standard Acorn account allows you to run your containers for up to two hours completely free, as often as you'd like. If you're not sure what to launch, we've got Acorns for Minecraft, Ghost, AutoGPT.js, Nextcloud, and many others you can start with.

Maybe you'd rather launch a container you already have? Creating your own Acornfiles and Acorn Images is straight forward for anyone familiar with Docker or Docker Compose. You can work with Acorn from the web interface , by linking the Acorn CLI to your account, or directly from our VSCode plugin.

Once you've got an Acorn image created and hosted on a public registry, you can create an Acorn link, which is an Acorn run command in URL form that you can embed anywhere. Try adding it to your GitHub project to make it easier for new users to deploy what you've built, or include it in social media posts, videos or tutorials.

We think you're going to love how easy Acorn makes it to create, deploy, and share software with anyone. We're hoping you love it so much, you stick around to run your production containers here as well. For long running workloads, we offer Pro accounts that allow you to pay for infrastructure as you use it. During the Beta, you can request a free Pro account, and we'll provide you with free long-running resources to try it out.

One of our founders, Bill Maxwell, has created a quick tutorial to walk you through Acorn, which we've included below. We hope you will give it a try and please let us know if you have any issues on our Slack channel.