Launch HN: Vendo (YC S26) – Let users build features on top of your product (github.com)
29 points by yousefh409 5 hours ago
Hi HN, we’re Yousef & Nour, founders of Vendo (https://vendo.run). Vendo lets users create new features inside the software they already use. A user describes the dashboard, workflow, or small app they need, and Vendo builds it on top of the product’s existing data, API, and interface.
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdpHehY64ls
We built Vendo because every SaaS eventually faces the same problem: every customer needs something slightly different. One wants a new report and another needs a workflow that only makes sense for their team. These requests either sit on the roadmap, become one-off engineering work, or force the customer into spreadsheets and external tools. We wanted the user to be able to create the missing feature themselves, without leaving the product.
Here is how it works:
- npx vendo init reads the product's API surface, theme, routes, and more. These are used so that the apps Vendo creates (1) look on-brand and native and (2) have the ability to read data and perform actions directly through the company's API
- When a user asks for a feature, we have a custom Vendo harness that writes a React component with a bunch of Vendo add-ons and guardrails (ex. ability to make calls to the host API + our component library). Every save is compiled, type-checked, run against real API responses, and rendered before the user sees it. We just released a benchmark and write-up here with more info for anyone interested: https://vendo.run/blog/generating-product-ui-measured
- We use QuickJS to make sure that anything the agent creates is sandboxed and can't mess with the company's site. Vendo compiles the component and runs it with Preact inside a QuickJS VM with no access to the DOM, network, or clock. The VM returns a UI tree, which the host renders using the product’s registered components. When the user clicks something, QuickJS emits a tool call; the host executes it through Vendo’s guard and passes the result back into the same VM, preserving the screen’s local state.
There's a lot of generative UI right now: streaming developer-written components into a chat (Vercel AI SDK, CopilotKit, Thesys), or rendering your app inside someone else's assistant (OpenAI Apps SDK, MCP Apps). We differ on two things. Vendo lives in your product and acts through your API as the signed-in user, so what it makes is durable: real apps users keep, pin, and run on triggers while they're away, and not components that are merely confined to a chat. Plus, it's not capped at putting together a bunch of prebuilt components: the agent can build arbitrary apps, from a quick dashboard out of your own components to real custom code running in a sandbox, and either way data only ever comes from tool calls to your API.
Here are some things customers are using Vendo for today:
- Letting their users create custom dashboards and reports. These are mainly UI-based and focused on letting the user see the exact graphs and metrics they care about
- Letting their customers create recurring automations. A big thing as well that has been used for these automations is the fact that we connect to external connections, so users have been automating many of their inter-tool workflows (ex. an automation that sends a slack alert based off of something in the product)
- B2B customers letting their customers customize the product with specific business logic. Often this is simple things like an extra field on a form, or an extra permission, but it is hard for a business to keep up with them otherwise.
- Creating and sharing custom dashboards/apps across an organization. Since the apps Vendo creates are durable, they can be shared, reused, and forked (which can’t be done with many of the other in-chat generative UI solutions)
We've spent a lot of time thinking about how AI and agents will change the way people consume software. We think the answer is personal(ized) software: you see the UI you need to see, you tell an agent exactly what you need, and the product molds to how you work.
The key insights that have enabled the product to work are:
- A rule in code always beats a rule in a prompt.
- Invent as little syntax as possible. Generation got faster and more reliable when the output looked like what models already know (JSX-shaped markup) instead of a clever custom format.
- Deterministic beats model wherever you can get away with it. Theme extraction is pure static analysis, and a remix starts as a copy of your component, no model call.
Vendo is completely open-source (Apache-2.0) and can be self-hosted, so feel free to check out all the source code here: https://github.com/runvendo/vendo.
Would love you to try it out and give us your feedback: https://docs.vendo.run/. Or if you’re a company looking to embed Vendo in your product feel free to book a call here: https://cal.com/team/vendo/intro-call
staticshock 2 hours ago
Not sure if this is productizable as-is, but I think it's absolutely the right direction. A lot of software has to become WAY more malleable directly in the hands of users.
Software vendors should be providing the platform, including any hard-to-build widgets, and "stock" look-and-feel so that the software is usable out of the box, but then the customers should be able to send their product feature requests directly to a chatbot, whether it is embedded into the platform (i.e. same vendor) or rides on top (i.e. different vendor).
This is the new form of UGC. The vendor can turn it into a marketplace within that platform, promote popular 3rd party features in that marketplace, etc.
yousefh409 2 hours ago
Great points!
mcmcmc 3 hours ago
I’ll say it: this sounds like it would be absolute hell for customer support. “Special” clients are already tough to manage with weird little workarounds and random business requirements. If you let them start making changes themselves, they will inevitably break it and then come to support freaking out because some “business critical” feature they made isn’t working how they want it to, or isn’t working at all. And how is customer support to know what the AI generated feature is, or how to fix it? Now make that possible for every customer, not just those paying enough money to throw their weight around, and you’ve got a recipe for a pissed off, burnt out help desk. And probably some stressed out account managers who have to smooth things over to try and retain the client. Does not surprise me the founders don’t appear to have much experience in customer-facing roles.
yousefh409 3 hours ago
Great points, and this is a problem we have spent a lot of time thinking about as well. Our current hypothesis, is that the models will reach (and have already arguably come very close) a level where problems like these can be resolved without any human intervention needed. That doesn't mean that problems won't arise, they for sure will (nothing will ever get to 100%), but the increasing strength of the agents will allow resolving those issues to become very consumer-friendly.
I would also encourage you to take a look at our benchmarks (linked in the post), that show how the gaurdrails we have in-place allow us to deliver pretty strong results to our users. And as a last point, most of our users are not creating business-critical features with Vendo right now. For a lot of them, it is an additional feature that they wished they had but didn't. And for the companies we work with, the benefit of providing their customers with this level of customization outweigths the possible risk that you mention.
Would love to hear more of your thoughts, thanks for the feedback!
mcmcmc 3 hours ago
> Our current hypothesis, is that the models will reach (and have already arguably come very close) a level where problems like these can be resolved without any human intervention needed.
Frankly I don’t think this is that relevant. When software breaks, most people don’t want to get support from another piece of software. They want human support. As the models get better, I’d wager the problems that fall through will get increasingly messy by nature of a) being hard enough to stump the model or b) the model running in circles making changes that obscure or worsen the problem. Especially if you have non-technical users who can’t accurately describe what they want or the problem with the current state.
Benchmarks and guardrails are nice and all, but as you said problems will never be 100% self correctable. Models are good enough until they aren’t. I like to take a “what’s the worst that could happen” approach to planning support. Murphy’s law and all that.
> And as a last point, most of our users are not creating business-critical features with Vendo right now.
Just give it some time… you’d be surprised what becomes business critical in the eyes of a customer. Sooner or later a report will become part of an accounting workflow etc, and it’ll break on the wrong day and suddenly payroll is late. You know how many Excel sheets are “business critical”? Same thing.
An alternative model you might consider is selling direct to the end user companies and taking a partnership approach to the apps you work with. End users come straight to you for help, you have a list of integrated apps you already support with the required plan/license from that vendor plus custom MCP support and features that don’t need an API, then sell professional services engagements if an end user client wants you to work with one of their vendors to set up a new integrated app. That way you reduce support friction, and your end users are aligned with your buyers.
blakeashleyjr 5 hours ago
What benefit does this provide over an excellent API + MCP access?
I often find my users want to throw their Claude at it and have everything handled. Users have even developed their own local UIs using Claude Design. As long as they are within the bounds of the MCP I already provide access to, no problem. This also has the added benefit of using the AI subscription the org already pays for (or using the customers).
Edit: Congrats on the launch and thanks for open sourcing!
yousefh409 4 hours ago
Great question! Honestly, not a lot. This is moreso for the rest of the population that does not even know Claude Code exists. A lot of our customers are vertical SaaS's that have tons of non-technical users using their product every day, and we want to bring them the power of claude code right inside their product.
I think you bring up a good point though on how consumption of software will evolve (and the possibility of Claude just being the entrance to everything), and I think this is soemthing we have been thinking a lot about as well.
avree 3 hours ago
Users so technically inept they can't use chatbots? Have them vibecode changes to your product today!
echelon 4 hours ago
I don't know - I think these Vendo guys are onto something here. Businesses will absolutely need to do this.
As a data point, our users are going a step further. We gave away our desktop software as OSS and our users fork and vibe code on top with the entire stack. They get the benefit of not having JavaScript powering a media heavy app since we wrote it in Rust. Now we have users making their own tutorials about it.
I think non experts will appreciate engineers solving for smoothness, distributed systems, and all the hard parts that can back them into corners. They want to fill in the UX / workflow pieces themselves.
I think these "hard part" pillars will endure for a while longer.
But you're going to have to give away more than you've ever given away before. Treat your users as junior engineers on your team. That's the new normal.
And for full disclosure, none of our users have software backgrounds whatsoever. They're just heavy into Claude Code as complete software newbies. It's really awesome to watch them building really neat workflows.
yousefh409 4 hours ago
That's really interesting. Would love to learn more about what type of customizations/features you have seen your users create?
cube00 an hour ago
Consider tightening up the pricing page. Paying $49/month for "$49 of usage a month" doesn't tell me what I'm getting. How many is "a few hundred", 200?
Pro $49/month
- Includes $49 of usage a month
- ≈ a few hundred active end-user sessions
"You are Vendo Auto, a safety judge for tool calls.",
"Choose run only when the call is appropriate for the user and context.",
"Choose ask when user confirmation is warranted, and block when the call must not proceed.",
"Return a concise rationale grounded in the supplied call, context, directions, and recent activity.",
yousefh409 7 minutes ago
Thanks for the feedback! The $49 of usage is used across AI inference, sandbox minutes, and so on. We mention it later on in the pricing page, but will make sure it is more clear fromt he onset.
And yes, the LLM safety judge is not in general access right now. Still experimenting, and it is not being used by any customers currently.
ibrahim_abdu777 2 hours ago
Interesting - but how do you ensure the generated UI's are high enough quality that I as a company would be happy showing them to my users. A lot of users are pretty tech-literate and would definitely critique anything that is wrong in the UI
yousefh409 2 hours ago
Great question! We have a couple things: (1) We have strict gaurdrails that makes sure that all data displayed in the generated comoponents is accurate and sourced from a real API call (2) We learn your design system and brand, so that everything Vendo generates looks and feels native (3) We have our library of pre-built components purpose-built for Vendo and how it works, which helps us increase the quality even more
arionhardison an hour ago
I am applying this to Gov. programs.
michaelmuzzin 4 hours ago
What is the extent of the customization of each dashboard type? How detailed can I get
yousefh409 4 hours ago
As detailed as the user wants. We don't limit the user with things like pre-built components and so on, so they can let their creativity run wild. What we chose to focus on instead, is making sure that the things they create are sandboxed, accurately representing the data at hand, and feel native in the product.