What a year.
Twelve months ago, we were a scrappy team of three with a vision and a lot of work ahead. Today, we’re seven people strong, we’ve shipped a lot of amazing features, and hundreds of thousands of people are building real apps with Mocha.
This is our 2025 year in review: a reminder of how far we’ve come, but more importantly a thank you to all of our users and community for building with us.
The Birth of Mocha
2025 was truly the birth year of Mocha.
We knew from day one that we wanted to build something different. Other app builders were already out there, but they all seemed to cut corners. They’d give you a pretty frontend, then punt to third-party services for auth, databases, and backend logic. Great for demos. Not so great for real apps.
We took the hard road.
Why? Because we hold a deep conviction that in order to build the best app builder, you need to adopt a vertically integrated approach. We need to build the best framework for AI to build apps with, natively integrate the harness for it, and finally build an intuitive interface for users to interact with it.
So, we built everything from scratch: authentication, databases, a complete frontend framework, backend infrastructure, and a coding agent that ties it all together.
In July, we launched Mocha 1.0 and things have been taking off ever since!
Our mission hasn’t changed: empower the 99% of people who have ideas but can’t code. That means we can’t cut corners. Every feature needs to work for someone who’s never opened a terminal in their life.
A Brand for Everyone
We rebranded. Twice-ish
First came the big one: Srcbook became Mocha. “Srcbook” was developer slang—most people couldn’t even pronounce it (how would you say it!?). If we were building for everyone, we needed a name everyone could say.
Then came the visual identity. We wanted Mocha to feel like it gives you superpowers. Not in a Silicon Valley way, but in an “I just built something real and I can’t believe it was that easy” way. Accessible. Empowering. Maybe a little magical.
An Agent That Thinks With You
The biggest evolution this year happened under the hood: Mocha became truly agentic.
Our AI started as a fixed turn-by-turn workflow. You’d say something, it’d respond, rinse and repeat. But that’s not the optimal way to build an agent that builds apps. We rebuilt the entire agent architecture into an agentic loop (much like Claude Code) where Mocha can think, plan, execute, and iterate on its own.
We spent countless hours engineering the context and building tools so that Mocha behaves like a technical partner, not a code autocomplete.
We also shipped Discuss Mode. Now you can chat with your app to ask questions without triggering changes. Curious how something works? Just ask. No risk of accidentally breaking things.
And then there’s continuous memory compaction. This is state-of-the-art: Mocha remembers your project—the relevant parts—without blowing up your credits. The agent stays smart about context, so you can keep building without worrying about hitting walls.
Our agent is at the core of Mocha and we’re constantly improving it. This field is brand new and evolving rapidly and our goal is to make Mocha the best app builder, so expect to see a lot of improvements and changes in the coming year.
Making Apps Real
An app isn’t real until other people can use it.
That’s why we shipped custom domains. Your Mocha app can live at yourdomain.com in just a few clicks. No DNS record modifications required. No confusing setup. Just type in your domain, and we handle everything automatically.
We also launched Spotlight—a place for people to launch their apps and get discovered. It’s a launchpad for our community to acquire their first customers, and a showcase of the incredible things people are building with Mocha. As a bonus, winners earn credits every month.
Go browse Spotlight sometime. You’ll be amazed at what non-technical people are creating.
Building for Everyone
If there’s one thing we obsess over, it’s accessibility. Not just in the technical sense, in the “can a busy business owner who’s got stuff to do figure this out immediately” sense.
We overhauled our layout to make features like data management and asset management more discoverable. This is hard. We’re building a powerful platform, and powerful platforms tend to get complicated. The bar we set for ourselves: make it intuitive for someone who’s never built software before. We’re not done, but we’re proud of where the new layout landed.
We added a guided flow for API integrations. APIs are confusing, especially if you don’t know what API even means (hint: with Mocha you don’t have to!). So we built interactive guides that walk you through the entire process, with intuitive ways to manage your API keys securely. Want to connect to Stripe? A weather API? AI services? Mocha walks you through it.
We added image generation to our agent. Mocha can now use Nano-banana to create images for your backgrounds, products, or designs. Need a hero image? Just ask.
And we shipped Direct Edit Mode—our first step toward letting you make changes just by clicking around. It’s simple by design right now. But this is a big focus for 2026. Get excited.
The Engine Room
Not everything exciting is visible to users.
We rebuilt our sandbox infrastructure. Twice. The result? Preview startup times got 2x faster and way more predictable. More importantly, this unlocks the ability to build custom agent tools that deeply connect your running app with the coding agent. You won’t see this directly—but you’ll feel it.
The Impact
Here’s what keeps us going: hundreds of thousands of people have used Mocha this year. They’ve built hundreds of thousands of apps. And the stories behind those numbers are what make this work meaningful.
We hear from people who could never build before. Someone creating an app for their retirement community. A side business owner finally bringing an idea to life. Business owners cutting agency fees by building their own intake forms, websites, and loyalty programs. Entrepreneurs getting to traction without needing to hire developers first.
These aren’t edge cases—they’re exactly who we built Mocha for. Every story like this reminds us why we took the hard road, why we built auth and databases and backends instead of cutting corners. Real apps for real people solving real problems.
That’s the 99% we’re here to empower.
Milestones
We launched on Product Hunt.
We were named Product of the Week.
That felt pretty good.
The Team
We started 2025 with three people. We’re ending it with seven.
We crossed some serious revenue and scale milestones along the way—milestones that keep us confident we’re building something people genuinely want. The team is more pumped than ever.
What’s Next
We believe other app builders don’t meet the bar of accessibility, correctness, and delight that we think they should. That’s why we’re building Mocha. We’re proud of where we are, but we have a long way to go.
2026 is going to be packed with new features, deeper agent capabilities, and improvements across the entire platform. Direct Edit Mode is just the beginning. We’re building the best app-building platform out there, and we’re not slowing down.
None of this would be possible without the incredible AI models powering Mocha. A huge thank you to our partners at Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI for building the technology that makes this all work.
And most importantly: thank you to our community. Every app you build, every piece of feedback you share, every bug you report—it all makes Mocha better. We’re building this for you.
Here’s to 2026. Let’s keep building. ☕