On Drift you sketch your app on Friday, deploy it on Sunday,
and your first users arrive on Monday.
15+building blocks
The terminal above just used three of these blocks at once, in 1.8 seconds. NoSQL, queues, schedules, secrets, blobs. The pieces almost any app you can think of is made of.
Back to the basicsDrift offers everything you need to compose a fast and secure app, and nothing more. If you can write it in one night, you should be able to deploy it in one night too.
A hyposcalerSmall on purpose, rather than not yet large. A short catalogue is not a short list of parts: the network boundary, the TLS, the encryption at rest and the isolation are all there on the first deploy. They are simply not optional, and not sold separately.
The five pillarsEvery Drift app is built from five pillars. These primitives talk to each other for you. The infrastructure underneath does not disappear. It stops being your job to assemble, and stops being something you can leave switched off.
Your code, as functions. Write an ordinary function, name it in your Driftfile, and Atomic builds it, gives it a route and guards it. No framework to learn and no server to configure.
Your slice's data layer. Documents, SQL, blobs, queues, secrets and a realtime hub, all reached from the SDK by name, with no connection string to manage and nothing to provision.
Your site, served on your slice's own URL, with your API on the same origin at /api. There is no CORS to configure because there is no second origin to configure it against.
Identity, verified. Passwordless device keys, tokens your slice signs itself, an encrypted keyring and per-identity storage. Deed verifies a signature; it never decides who you are.
How a slice is reached, and how far it can reach back. Custom domains, a gate in front of the site, private calls to your other slices, and the allowlist your functions dial out through.
Every one of these blocks is already provisioned, networked and encrypted before you write a line. Where all of it runs, and whose law reaches it, is next.
0foreign-owned links
Built in the EU, hosted in the EU, owned in the EU. A region is only a location. Jurisdiction is who can compel access, and nothing in the path your slice's data takes answers to anybody else.
One exception, and it sits outside the seal
Transactional email, meaning the signup code and the renewal notices, goes out through Microsoft 365. Your account's email address therefore passes through a company with a US parent, even though the entity and the servers are Irish. Your slice never does: not the source, the database, the blobs, the secrets, the identities or the site. The transport is moving to an EU-owned provider, and until it has, this is where the argument above costs us something. Data processing states the full scope.
None of this is a setting you turn on, and none of it is a region you select. It is where the company is, whose courts reach it, and what the data path is made of. Whether you could ever leave is the next question.
100%portable
Being hosted in the EU was one half of a deal; this is the other half. Portable by default. No lock-in: export your project and run it somewhere else, or self-host it.
From that date the EU Data Act makes portability a legal right for every cloud customer in Europe, not just good practice.
$ drift slice snapshot download
One command, and everything you handed us comes back: your original source code, your secrets, every NoSQL document, your blobs, your queues and your Canvas sites, as a plain tar.gz.
Your source arrives with every Drift-generated wrapper stripped out. No proprietary format, nothing to reverse-engineer.
To us, portability was a fundamental design decision, not an afterthought, and not something we implemented because we were forced to. The best way to test that claim costs nothing.
Freeforever
None of what you just read costs anything to try first. Real functions, a real database, a real website, for your experiments. No trial, no credit card.
You get one free Slice the moment you register. Use it to experiment, or to actually ship something: a personal portfolio, a landing page, a blog. It's yours; what you build with it is up to you.
Beyond free
You can always create new Slices and pay for what you need. And if you outgrow one, you can resize it piecemeal (maybe one more function, maybe 20 MB more SQL) and pay only the difference.
That is the whole free tier: no meter running underneath it, nothing held back until you upgrade. Installing the CLI is the only step left.
You watched this exact sequence run at the top of the page. Install the CLI, take your free slice, then point it at the folder you are already standing in and let it do the rest.
Drift is in closed alpha. We will update you when it is ready.