I came across: FastAPI Cloud.
Built by the same team behind FastAPI itself. Still in beta. Free hobby tier, no credit card, up to 3 apps.
The pitch is simple: deploying a FastAPI app has always required work that has nothing to do with FastAPI - writing a Dockerfile, configuring ports, setting up a Render or Railway dashboard, writing a Procfile, remembering to add uvicorn to requirements.txt. None of that is your actual application. It's all overhead that stands between finishing your code and having it live on a real URL.
FastAPI Cloud removes all of it. The deploy command is:
fastapi deploy
That's it. I sent the link to the cohort group chat and then immediately opened my own terminal to try it.
What Actually Happened
I pointed it at a simple bookshop API I had sitting in a local folder - GET /books, POST /books, nothing fancy. Ran fastapi deploy. The CLI asked if I wanted to log in, opened a browser auth page, and I was authenticated in under a minute.
Then it asked which team to deploy to. I selected RAG AI (my workspace), confirmed the directory, and it started building.
The build log scrolled through installing dependencies, copying source code, configuring the working directory - and then:
Ready the chicken! 🐔
Your app is ready at https://bookshop-api.fastapicloud.dev
I genuinely laughed at "Ready the chicken." Then I clicked the link.
Green checkmark. us-east-1. Last updated 36 seconds ago. A real deployed app on a real public URL, from a project folder sitting on my Windows laptop, in under three minutes total.
/docs - live, interactive, the full Swagger UI. GET /books, POST /books, Book schema in the Schemas section. A complete deployed API with automatic documentation, no configuration file written, no dashboard manually created.
Why This Matters for Teaching
The hardest part of teaching FastAPI to beginners isn't FastAPI. It's everything that comes after - "now how do I show someone else what I built?"
Getting a student from working local API to public URL currently takes anywhere from 20 minutes to an entire class session, depending on which platform you use and what breaks. Docker confusion, Render free-tier cold starts, missing environment variables, wrong start commands - all of that is friction that has nothing to do with the actual skill we're trying to teach.
fastapi deploy collapses that to three minutes and one command. For a teaching context, that's not a small improvement. That changes what's possible in a single session.
Caveats Worth Knowing
It's in beta. The free hobby tier covers up to 3 apps, which is enough for ssomeone projects and quick demos. I don't know yet how it handles environment variables for projects with API keys (the RAG build would need that), persistent storage, or what happens at higher traffic. Those are questions for when they're out of beta.
But for what it does right now - take a FastAPI project and put it on a live public URL with one command - it works exactly as advertised.
Try It
pip install "fastapi[standard]"
fastapi deploy
You need a FastAPI project already set up locally. Head to fastapicloud.com, sign up for the hobby tier, and try it against something you've already built. The deploy takes about two minutes. The /docs URL works immediately.
If you've been putting off deploying a project because the setup felt like too much overhead - this removes the excuse.
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