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Zenith, a developer platform for shipping and selling your app

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Hi HN! I'm Liam and I'm one of the people building Zenith.Most selfhosted apps ship with the best features switched off. OAuth, email and AI need users to provide accounts, API keys, an SMTP server that whoever runs the app (on their own servers!) don't have, so developers leave out the best features. And the people most willing to pay for an app usually can't run a server at all.Zenith is a place to ship and sell those apps with the features on from day one. We simply extend Docker compose with an x-zenith: object to get a zenith-compose.yml, and inside the block you can set up OpenAI compatible API, SMTP, Sign in with Zenith, secret management, filebrowser, etc all autoconfigured though environment variables.With the cli you can do a `zenith publish` and get a spot on the marketplace and a cut of the revenue. Your users can then deploy a fully managed instance. Want to test emails with SMTP? You can spin up an identical preview deployment with `zenith up` and it just works.On the roadmap is Resend and Twillio compatible email, SMS APIs, Sign in with ChatGPT, Google account connections, GPUs, sitewide notifications (mobile app maybe?)We'd love to know which integration you'd want next, and see what apps you publish! Supercharge your project today! npm install -g @zenith-hosting/cli

HN · launched Nov 5, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 66%) · 0 views

Niche: cloud and application hosting platforms · 146 launches, 8 in the last 7 days ▼ -53% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Partial The developer dashboard, app listing, and Stripe-style billing are vibe-codeable, but the platform must securely provision and relay OAuth, email, and AI credentials into self-hosted instances. Running that as a multi-tenant hosting service requires serious infrastructure and security work.

What it would actually take: The core stack is a web app plus Stripe billing, container or VM-based app hosting, and a licensing or entitlement system. The hard parts are secure multi-tenant isolation, a credential-brokering or proxy layer for third-party services, and reliable hosting operations. That needs DevOps and security engineering expertise.

Discussion

2 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: unclear whether an LLM is involved, product age unclear

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 60 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #35 of 61 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 371 days after the earliest competitor.

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