Changelog - May 26, 2026
Lately: Claude front and center, a fresh val layout, MCP upgrades, new Pro pricing (for new users), and more.
The month of Claude
More and more Val Town users are having Claude Code bebop, wibble, photosynthesize, and jitterbug1 their vals, using the Val Town MCP server. Every val's homepage now includes a copyable command for using Val Town MCP + Claude Code.
The val.town homepage also now has that command handy to meet our potential users where existing users are using Val Town—in Claude Code. You can bring the Val Town MCP anywhere you get your LLMs, though—not just Claude. It works in Codex, Cursor, Copilot—you name it. If it starts with C and thinks all your ideas are great, it'll work with Val Town.
Townie now defaults to Claude Opus 4.6 with "Allow all" mode (a.k.a. YOLO mode) enabled (although you might consider taking things slow sometimes).
When starting a new chat, Townie remembers your selected mode and model from the last active chat. Opus 4.7 with xhigh effort level is also available, along with Sonnet 4.6 and Haiku 4.5 for faster and cheaper conversations. Inference is billed at-cost, without any markup: see our pricing update below for more information.
Our MCP server has new tools to remix vals and and copy files. That's over three dozen tools now. Pretty much anything you can do in Val Town, you can do with the MCP server:
- read/write/run code
- read/write SQLite and blob storage and logs
- set up cron jobs and email handlers
- visit HTTP URLs
- ...and more
New val layout
The biggest change in town lately is to the core val UI:
- Both the val sidebar and file tree are collapsible, allotting more real estate to the file you're editing
- There's an editor status bar abottom the code editor with logs, editor settings, and the Deno Language Server
- You can view history for folders, files, and the whole val
- The SQLite explorer makes better use of available space
- Townie launches from the top right rather than bottom left
- ...and dozens more changes
I've been loving the new layout, personally. Thanks to Jackson for his careful craftsmanship!
Pricing updates
We increased Pro pricing to $25/month, or $250/year. If you are an existing Pro user, your prices won't change! As a thank you for betting on us early, existing Pro users will pay the legacy $10 per month (or $100 yearly) forever.
After using up monthly Townie credits ($10 monthly for Pro and $100 for Business), billing is now pay-as-you-go with 0% markup on LLM inference costs. We pass through costs from our upstream provider, Anthropic.
Free plans are limited to public vals, only for new vals. Existing private vals on Free accounts will remain private.
Also, the Val Town Teams plan is now called Business.
Everything else
As always, many more changes have landed.
Val history and file diffs can attribute edits to Townie.
A Val ID field and HTTP section were added to val settings, so you can copy IDs and set *.val.run custom subdomains (as well as which HTTP file to preview on the val's homepage, as before). There's also a new save-and-copy button when adding a custom subdomain or email.
The main val.town/dashboard now has a switcher for toggling between your personal account and any orgs you belong to. User profiles also got a facelift—you can pin vals to feature your best work (like you'd pin repos on your GitHub profile).
The new val creation flow always has you fill out a form with owner, name, description, visibility, and image. Previously, you could create an untitled-* val, which was convenient, but it meant metadata wasn't as deliberate.
You can now download any public val, not just your own vals.
Script val logs now stream during execution rather than buffering until exit.
You can now sign in with Google, as an alternative to GitHub and email.
Townie now remixes opinionated starter templates by default when building new projects.
When you're on a branch in a val's code and navigate to another top-level resource, like SQLite, then back to the code—your branch now persists.
A confirmation dialog now appears in the SQLite explorer for destructive actions.
That's it for this changelog. As always, send us your feature requests! Our Discord server is the best place to discuss requests.
Footnotes
(1) Bebopping, wibbling, photosynthesizing, and jitterbugging are all, in fact, in the Claude Code spinner verb dictionary. I'd play a quiz game of "Is it a Claude spinner verb?" if someone made one. Hm, you could probably make one in 5 minutes with Claude Code and the Val Town MCP server...
Fetched May 27, 2026
