Post by sneil about Pipe ($PIPE)

$PIPE : the free Hosting plan is good, but changing one CSS file still means installing Rust

I make websites, so I looked at Pipe Hosting from the static-site side. I read the Hosting guide and the pricing page, downloaded both starter ZIPs (pipe.network/downloads/pipe-host-starter.zip and pipe-host-starter-source.zip) and went through the files.

The Free plan is more than I expected: 2 sites, 100k dynamic requests, 5 GB transfer and 100 MB SQLite, with no auto-renewal and no overage charges. I also liked expected_active in the CI flow, which stops two deploys from overwriting each other.

Where I got stuck:

1) Every frontend change goes through a Rust build. build.rs compiles html/ into app.wasm, and "pipe.py bundle" runs cargo before anything else. To edit index.html or styles.css I would need Rust 1.95.0 and the wasm32-wasip1 target installed, which is a lot to ask from someone with a plain HTML site.

2) The README in the source ZIP says to deploy with "the host's scripts/deploy.py" and mentions "prebuilt/pipe-app.zip". I couldn't find either file in pipe-host-starter-source.zip. pipe.py also says "no remote Pipe deployment API is assumed", while the guide documents that API.

3) The guide says a rollback changes the code and leaves the database as it is. It doesn't show how to do a rollback, from the UI or the API.

4) The HTML of /pricing ships "—" in place of every price, and JavaScript fills the numbers in later. Link previews, crawlers and AI agents that don't run JS see no prices.

What would help: a "pipe.py bundle --static" option, or reusing the prebuilt app.wasm, so HTML/CSS edits don't need Rust. A README that matches the hosting guide, a one-line rollback example, and plan prices rendered on the server.

One question: the pricing page bills everything in prepaid USDC credit. Where does the PIPE token come in for a Hosting customer today? Is burn-to-credit live yet, or still planned?