restful
Start free trial
DocsStart here

Getting started

From signing up to a working machine in ~5 minutes.

The whole flow is four steps. Allow about 5 minutes start to finish.

1. Sign up

Head to restful.host and drop your email in the form. We'll email you a sign-in link straight away; no waiting on an approval.

2. Start your trial

Sign in with the link we sent you. The dashboard prompts you to start your free trial before you can spin up a machine. Your first 7 days are free, then it's $59/month. A card is required to start the trial, but nothing is charged until day 8.

There's no usage-based billing on top. The $59 covers the machine, the subdomain, the wildcard TLS cert, the agent, the browser terminal, the uploads modal, and ongoing platform updates. Your Claude subscription is separate and stays with Anthropic.

3. Your machine boots

Click Create machine. Provisioning takes about 60–90 seconds. You'll watch a progress bar move through:

  1. Creating the droplet at DigitalOcean
  2. Allocating a public IPv4
  3. Writing DNS for <your-slug>.restful.host and *.<your-slug>.restful.host
  4. Issuing a wildcard TLS cert via Let's Encrypt
  5. Installing the restful-agent + browser terminal + Claude Code
  6. Running the bootstrap script

When it's done, you have an Ubuntu 24.04 droplet sitting at <slug>.restful.host. The slug is a pet-name like smooth-garden or steady-snowdrop, randomly generated, yours forever.

4. Connect your Claude account

From the dashboard, click Open console. Your machine opens with Claude Code already running and prompting you to sign in, so there's no command to type. Follow the link it prints, sign in on claude.ai, and you're authenticated.

See Connecting Claude for the full flow including the OAuth handoff and how to use an API key instead.

What now?

Talk to Claude. Once you're authenticated, the console drops you straight into a Claude session. Try something like:

You: build me a todo app

Claude scaffolds the project, picks a port, starts the dev server. When it's running, ask:

You: deploy it

Claude knows about restful-expose (via the restful-vps skill on the box), so it picks a name, wires nginx, and gives you back a live URL like https://todo.<your-slug>.restful.host/ in a few seconds.

That's the loop. Build something, ship it, share the URL. You can drop down to the shell anytime (Ctrl+B then D detaches Claude and gives you a plain tmux pane), but the day-to-day flow is just talking to Claude.

See Deploying apps for how restful-expose works under the hood, and /remote-control for driving the same session from your phone.

Something missing or out of date? Tell us or check the support center.