Build and run civic software — fast, accountable, free.
Push your code and the platform does the rest: automatic builds, releases, hosting, and a full record of every change. The same system major European banks and DHL run production on — free for developers building civic tech in New York.
4 → 400+
Releases/year → releases/month, Komerční Banka on CodeNOW
~70%
Reduction in DevOps costs
ISO/IEC 27001
Information security management, certified
Getting here
Two ways onto the Platform.
You reach the Platform two ways: hand off a staffed plan from The Starting Line, or bring your own repo.
Plan → Build & Run
Hand off a staffed plan
The Starting Line is where organizers and residents plan a civic tech project and vote on the team. When the plan is ready, developers pick it up here and start building.
Explore The Starting LineDirect
Bring your own repo
Already have code and a team? Skip the planning stage entirely. Request developer access and push your code straight in.
The pipeline
Push your code. The platform does the rest.
Push components
Register the component; the platform owns it from here.
Automatic CI/CD
One pipeline definition, run identically on every trigger.
Kubernetes
Deployed to governed, auditable cluster environments.
Preview → staging → release
Promotion is a controlled, logged path — not a judgment call.
Production
Stoppable and reproducible at every layer, on demand.
The offering
Fast and accountable — at the same time.
Most software platforms trust developers to do the right thing. CodeNOW enforces it structurally. Every component, every environment, every deployment is registered with the platform — not running loose in someone's cloud account. Pipelines are defined once and run identically on every trigger. Builds are reproducible: the same source and the same inputs always produce the same artifact.
That structure is why regulated institutions trust it. Komerční Banka went from four major release cycles a year to an agile organization capable of over four hundred independent monthly releases on CodeNOW — while cutting DevOps costs roughly 70% and overall delivery costs 20%, integrating 40+ open-source tools on Kubernetes without standing up a dedicated DevOps team.
Civic projects don't face banking auditors, but they do face board members, grant committees, and the public. The same auditability that satisfies a bank's compliance team makes your software work transparent to stakeholders who have every right to know how it runs.
Every action is logged
Who deployed what, when, from which source commit — all of it is in the platform record. Nothing is reconstructed after the fact.
Pipelines are enforced, not suggested
Your build definition runs the same way every time. No local variations, no "works on my machine" — the pipeline is the contract.
Environments are registered
Development, staging, and production are platform-managed. Access, promotion, and rollback go through the same controlled path.
Stoppable at any layer
A deployment that looks wrong can be paused or rolled back from the platform — not by SSH-ing into a server and hoping.
AI agents
Built to hold a bank. Which is why it holds an AI agent.
CodeNOW was built for financial services, defense, and critical infrastructure — places where speed without governance isn't progress, it's exposure. None of those controls assume the thing pushing code is a person. So when you add AI agents, you don't add a new safety model. You treat them as non-human team members and run them under the one you already have: same identity model, same permissions, same audit trail, same execution boundary.
That matters because the two ways agent-written software goes wrong look identical from the outside. A bad actor steers an agent into doing something it shouldn't. A hallucinating agent confidently does something nobody asked for. Neither reaches production by a side door, because there is no side door — every action is attributable to a named identity, and the promotion path is the only path.
So the show goes on. Humans and agents hand work back and forth inside the boundary, at whatever speed they can manage, and the SDLC they run inside is the same one a regulated institution audits.
Identifiable
agent.dev.architect-01
Every agent runs as its own named identity — not a shared service account. What it did is attributable to it.
Permissioned
scoped · revocable
An agent's scope is explicit and narrow: which application, which stage, which actions. Permissions are granted, and taken back.
Auditable
every action attributable
The trail accrues as work happens — story, sub-tasks, commits, builds, image tags, package version, deployment run. Nothing is reconstructed afterward.
Stoppable
disable · revoke · pause
If something looks wrong, one switch: identity disabled, permissions revoked, workflow paused. The worst case is a paused agent and a reverted release.
Either governance is structural, or it's already behind.
The infrastructure
Enterprise infrastructure, running free in NYC.
One half-time administrator runs this instance for New York City, on enterprise servers donated to the cause. There is no hosting bill, no minimum spend, no cloud invoice to worry about — the same system that replaces a bank's DevOps team runs here for free.
The cluster is connected to the internet over NYC Mesh— a volunteer-owned community network that provides independent, community-controlled internet connectivity across New York City. Using NYC Mesh means the platform's internet access is itself civic infrastructure: not dependent on a single commercial carrier, and operated by the community for the community.
Proof, not pitch
This site is a tenant on the platform.
The website you're reading runs on the same CodeNOW platform described above. Every time a code change lands, the platform builds it, promotes it through environments, and records the release. The metrics and environment status below are pulled live from the cluster — not configured, not staged.
Real DORA + per-environment deploy data, pulled live from the cluster — not a screenshot.
Tenant
CodeNOW® · NYC Mesh cluster
Developer docs
Build against the docs.
The official CodeNOW documentation covers the self-service portal, the MCP server, and the end-to-end developer workflow this platform runs on.
Developer Docs
Reference Docs
Getting access
Three tiers of access.
Membership is instant and free. Developer and tenant access is by arrangement — we set each one up by hand to make sure the fit is right.
Public-interest member
Sign up free and you're in immediately — no approval, no credit card. Use the live tools, explore the community, and follow what's being built.
Developer access
Want to write code on the platform? Request developer access and we'll set you up on the developer side by hand.
Platform tenant
Build and run your own components and environments as a full CodeNOW tenant on the NYC Mesh cluster — and share what you ship with the civic community.
The platform is ready. You just build.
Push your code and ship — no DevOps team required.
Questions? About the program →