About Lucity
Lucity is built by zeitlos.software, a Swiss software boutique based in Switzerland. It's open source, AGPL-3.0 licensed, and very much a work in progress.
The honest pitch
Let's not pretend: Lucity is heavily inspired by Railway. If you've used Railway, the concepts will feel familiar: projects, services, environments, deploy on push, environment promotion. We think Railway is a great product. We use it ourselves.
But Railway has a problem, and it's the same problem every managed PaaS has: you can't leave. Your deployment configuration, your environment setup, your promotion workflows. They all live inside Railway's systems, in Railway's formats. The moment you outgrow it (or your compliance team asks where your data is hosted), you start from scratch.
Lucity takes the developer experience that Railway got right and builds it on top of tools you already know: Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD, Gateway API. The entire platform state lives in Git and Kubernetes. There's no proprietary database holding your configuration hostage. And when you want to leave, you run lucity eject and walk away with standard Helm charts and ArgoCD configs.
That's the actual difference. Not "we're better than Railway." More like "we're Railway, but the infrastructure is yours."
Built with AI
Here's the part that makes some people uncomfortable: Lucity is largely built with Claude Code.
Not "AI generated a todo app." This is a multi-service platform: seven Go microservices communicating over gRPC, a GraphQL API gateway, a Vue 3 dashboard, Helm charts, protobuf definitions, integration tests. The kind of software that traditionally takes a team and months of work.
We built it to see how far modern LLM-assisted development workflows can take an experienced software architect. The answer, it turns out, is pretty far, with caveats.
The AI is remarkably good at scaffolding services, wiring up gRPC connections, generating GraphQL resolvers, and building Vue components. It's less good at the parts that require taste: architecture decisions, API design, knowing when an abstraction is premature. The 70/30 split is real: Claude writes about 70% of the code, but the 30% that requires human judgment is where the actual product decisions live.
This isn't a pitch for AI-assisted development. It's an honest data point. We're documenting the process because we think the industry benefits from real examples of what works and what doesn't, rather than breathless hype or reflexive dismissal.
Made in Switzerland
zeitlos.software is a Swiss company. Lucity Cloud (the managed offering) runs on EU infrastructure, with Swiss data residency planned for the coming months. This isn't a marketing gimmick. It matters for a specific audience.
If you're a Swiss agency building software for banks, insurance companies, or cantonal government, "where is the data hosted?" is not a theoretical question. The Cloud Act, Schrems II, and the Swiss FADP/nDSG create real compliance requirements. Most developer-friendly platforms are American companies running on American infrastructure. That's fine for a lot of use cases. It's not fine for all of them.
Lucity Cloud exists for the cases where it's not fine. EU hosting is available today; Swiss hosting is coming soon.
For everyone else: Lucity is open source. Self-host it wherever you want. The Swiss angle is a bonus, not a requirement.
What this is (and isn't)
Lucity is an early-stage open-source project. It works, but it's not feature-complete. There are rough edges. The documentation you're reading right now is probably the most polished part of the project.
What it is: a functional PaaS that builds, deploys, and manages applications on Kubernetes with a clean developer experience and genuine ejectability.
What it isn't (yet): a production-ready managed service with 99.9% SLA, 24/7 support, and a mature plugin ecosystem. We'll get there. For now, it's a platform built by people who care about doing it right, released early because we believe in building in the open.
If that sounds interesting, start here. If you want to help, the repo is open.