This is the short, opinionated walkthrough — describe an app, watch it build, deploy it. By the end you'll have a real URL you can send to a friend.
You need a free MaximusDev account and an idea you can describe in a sentence or two. You don't need any code, any tools installed, or any clue what a "framework" is. If you can write a text message to a friend explaining what you want, that's the level we're working at.
Free tier includes 100 credits a month. Building a small app and tweaking it once usually costs around 30–60. If you run out, you can upgrade or wait until next month.
Open the build view. You'll see a chat panel on the left and an empty preview on the right. In the chat, write what you want. Be specific about who it's for and what it does — vague prompts get vague apps.
A good prompt looks like this:
# Good
A booking page for an independent yoga teacher.
Weekly schedule, contact form, mailing list signup.
Calm look, no booking payment for now.
A vague one looks like this — try to avoid it:
# Vague — don't do this
A wellness website. Make it look nice.
MaximusDev builds the app live, in front of you. The right pane fills in as it works — first the structure, then the styling, then the content. It usually takes 2–5 minutes for a small app.
You can stop it any time and tweak the prompt. The app is yours from the first second; nothing is held hostage.
When the build finishes, click anything to edit it. Type a follow-up message in the chat to make broader changes:
Click Deploy. You'll get a live URL on your-app.maximusdev.app within about 30 seconds. Send it to a friend. If you have your own domain, you can point it at this URL later.
That's it. You shipped an app.
Now that the basics work, the rest of these docs cover the things you'll want next: adding a database, accepting form submissions, custom domains, and — when you're ready — TraceSeal receipts for handling real customer data.
Plain prose, reverse-chronological. We update this every time something user-visible changes. No emoji, no marketing puffery — just what changed and why.
You can now publish your apps to maximusdev.app — the public showcase of what people are building. Submit your live URL, a screenshot, and a one-line description, and we'll review it within a week.
This is opt-in. Nothing you build is showcased without you submitting it explicitly.
Every receipt now embeds the cryptographic fingerprint of the model that produced the response, in addition to its name and version. This means a receipt is a permanent, verifiable proof that this exact model weights file was used — not just a model with the same name.
If you're on the Compliance tier, you don't need to do anything. Existing receipts get the fingerprint added during verification.
Bring-your-own-key for Anthropic, OpenAI, and OpenRouter is now a single dropdown in your account settings. Paste a key, pick a default model, done. We don't keep a copy — the key lives encrypted in your account and is decrypted only at request time.
This was previously buried in a four-step flow. Sorry about that.
The £79 desktop app now runs about 40% faster on first build, mostly thanks to a smarter dependency cache. It also picks up the new MaximusDev brand identity — same logo, same palette, same restraint.
Existing licence holders get this as a free update. Open the app and it'll prompt you to upgrade.
We've moved from four tiers to four cleaner ones, with the Compliance tier split into a base option and an EU AI Act extension. Prices stayed the same; nothing in your bill changed.
Pro and above can point a domain you own at any deployed app. Add a CNAME in your DNS provider, paste the domain in your app's settings, and we'll handle the certificate within a few minutes.
Subdomains like app.example.com work; apex domains (example.com) need an ALIAS record. Full instructions in the docs.
Every AI call from your app is now signed and stored as a TraceSeal receipt — a tamper-evident JSON record of what was sent, what came back, and which model produced it. This is the first compliance feature we know of in this category.
It's £39/mo on top of Pro. More on what receipts are and why they matter →