Serverpod 4: Full-stack hot reload, agentic coding, offline sync, and more

Today, we are releasing Serverpod 4. It’s by far the largest update we have made to the Serverpod development experience since starting the project.

📺 Watch the full Keynote on YouTube

Serverpod 4 introduces full-stack hot reload, a completely new workflow built around agentic coding, embedded Postgres for local development, a client-side database with experimental offline sync, and more than a hundred other features and improvements.

Together with Serverpod 4, we are also launching Serverpod Cloud: Zero-configuration deployments of your backend, database, and Flutter web app. Starting at just $5/month.

If you haven’t yet given Serverpod a spin or if it was a while ago, this is the time. Our new quickstart guide takes you from zero to a production app in less than 10 minutes. If you haven’t got Flutter installed and just want to play around, we’re introducing Serverpod App Studio, a downloadable app containing a full development environment.

We couldn’t be prouder of this release. It’s a leap forward in developer experience and a full stack built from the ground up for agentic coding.

Nova explaining what's new in Serverpod 4.

Built for a new way of coding

Serverpod is the open-source backend for Flutter. It lets you build your app, server, and database layer in Dart, with type safety all the way from your Postgres database to your Flutter application.

With Serverpod 3, our focus was on making that stack ready for serious production applications. We invested heavily in security, robustness, authentication, our web server, and the parts of the framework that become increasingly important as an application grows.

Today, Serverpod is used by startups, app agencies, banks, medical companies, governments, and thousands of apps around the world.

For Serverpod 4, we asked a different question. What should app development look like when AI agents become part of the development workflow? Simply giving an AI agent access to the same tools developers have used for decades isn’t enough. The entire development loop needs to change.

So we rebuilt it.

Agentic coding, built in

Serverpod 4 comes with AI agent skills and an MCP server out of the box. The agent skills turn your agent into a senior Serverpod developer. The MCP server goes a step further by connecting the agent directly to your running development environment. Your agent can access server and application logs and understand what is happening in the running app.

But the really interesting part happens when this is combined with hot reload.

Hot reload for your entire stack

Flutter changed application development by making the feedback loop almost instantaneous. Change some code, save the file, and immediately see the result without losing your application’s state.

With Serverpod 4, we are extending that idea across the full stack.

Start your project with:

serverpod start

Serverpod starts your backend, runs your database, launches and manages your Flutter app, and watches the entire stack for changes. Your app, backend, and database now behave as a single development environment.

This becomes especially powerful when you work with an AI agent. Tell the agent what you want to build and watch the application evolve. When your agent changes a data model, Serverpod instantly regenerates the code and updates the database. It can add an endpoint, and the running server picks it up. It can change the Flutter interface, and the application updates immediately.

In most cases, Serverpod can even preserve your application and backend state throughout the process. Everything just keeps running.

One command for your development environment

We have also completely rebuilt the experience around serverpod start. Previously, local development could mean a database running in one terminal, Serverpod logs in another, and Flutter running somewhere else. Serverpod 4 brings the entire local stack together. The new interface shows what is running, makes logs easier to follow, and coordinates reloads across your application, server, generated code, and database.

We also wanted to remove one of the biggest sources of friction when starting a backend project: Setting up a local database. Serverpod 4 includes an embedded Postgres server for development. There is no need to configure Docker just to get started. Create a project, run serverpod start, and your database is ready.

This makes testing easier, too. No separate database setup is required to run your Serverpod test suite. Just run:

dart test

For production, Serverpod still connects to an external Postgres database exactly as before. The embedded database is purely about simplifying the local development loop.

Hot reload for the web

Serverpod’s web server is part of the same hot-reload environment. The included web server comes prepared to host your Flutter web app, serve a website or landing page, receive webhooks, host static files, or create custom APIs and responses.

Web routes now participate in the same hot-reload workflow as the rest of your backend and Flutter app. This means your mobile application, backend, website, and integrations can all live in one Dart project and evolve together.

SQLite and experimental offline sync

Serverpod has always provided a type-safe ORM for working with Postgres on the backend. Serverpod 4 brings that experience to the client with SQLite support. Your Flutter application can use the same Serverpod models and the same type-safe approach to working with data locally.

But SQLite support is only the beginning. For the past eighteen months, we have been working on one of the most technically challenging features we have ever built: Full offline sync.

With offline sync, your Flutter application can have its own local database. It can read and write data without a network connection and synchronize those changes with your Serverpod backend when connectivity becomes available. Synchronization works in both directions, and thanks to Serverpod’s streaming APIs, updates can happen in real time.

We have also worked hard to keep the configuration to a minimum. To make a model synchronized, simply add:

database: sync

That’s it.

Serverpod manages synchronization between SQLite and Postgres, including model relationships and unique constraints.

Offline sync is experimental in Serverpod 4.0. We want developers to start building with it and tell us where it needs improvement. Our plan is to make it stable in Serverpod 4.1.

More than 100 features and improvements

Hot reload, agentic coding, the new development runtime, and offline sync are the biggest additions, but Serverpod 4 contains so much more.

Since Serverpod 3, we have shipped more than 100 features, along with numerous fixes and improvements.

Some highlights:

• Shared data models. Models can now live in a separate Dart package and be shared between your Serverpod server and Flutter application.
• Improved future calls. Future calls can be declared as normal Dart methods, with Serverpod generating the scheduling code. Recurring future calls are now supported as well.
• Expanded authentication. Serverpod supports email, Google, Apple, Facebook, GitHub, Microsoft, and Firebase authentication, as well as anonymous users and custom authentication providers.
• Improved cloud storage. We have expanded Serverpod’s storage APIs and the ways Serverpod can connect to different storage providers.
• Security improvements. We have continued to harden the framework, including extensive security reviews.

And that is still only part of the list. You can find everything in the Serverpod changelog.

Introducing Serverpod Cloud

Building the application is only half the story. Eventually, your backend needs somewhere to run. There are now more than a thousand new Serverpod projects created every month, and each eventually reaches the same question: How do I get this into production?

Serverpod can be deployed anywhere you can run Dart, and that isn’t changing. Avoiding platform lock-in is fundamental to Serverpod. But not every application developer wants to become a DevOps expert.

Today, we launch Serverpod Cloud.

Serverpod Cloud is a hosting platform built specifically for Serverpod. From your terminal, you can deploy your project with a single command. Serverpod Cloud builds the application, runs your migrations, configures the infrastructure, and brings the new version online. The same process can run from your CI/CD pipeline, making deployments completely automatic.

As your application grows, Serverpod Cloud can grow with it. It manages server instances, load balancing, domains, certificates, your database, secrets, and file storage.

Serverpod Insights is also integrated directly into the Cloud experience. It lets you monitor CPU and memory usage, but more importantly, you can understand what is happening inside the application.

We like to think we handle the difficult stuff so you can spend your time on the fun stuff.

Serverpod Cloud starts at $5 per month

We have spent the summer optimizing Serverpod Cloud to make it as affordable as possible to run a real application. The Starter plan launches at just $5 per month and includes a Postgres database and a CDN. There is also a free one-month trial with no credit card required. At the Starter level, we have benchmarked Serverpod Cloud at up to 5,000 requests per minute.

This means the Serverpod development loop can now stretch all the way from an idea to a production app. Build locally, iterate with hot reload, and deploy when you are ready without having to configure your own infrastructure.

But there was still one part of that loop we wanted to make easier.

Introducing Serverpod App Studio

If you are already an experienced Flutter developer, you probably have your development environment exactly the way you want it. Flutter. Dart. Xcode. Android Studio. Simulators. SDKs. Environment variables. For someone new to Flutter, however, getting all of that installed can be a significant first step. AI coding has created a new group of developers who want to build apps without first spending hours configuring their computer.

That’s why we built Serverpod App Studio. The first public beta is available today. App Studio packages everything you need to build a real Serverpod and Flutter application into a single desktop app.

Download it. Double-click it. Build something real.

App Studio includes the tooling required to create and run your application. Bring your coding agent of choice, tell it what you want to build, and watch the application take shape.

Because App Studio uses the same Serverpod agent skills and MCP integration as our regular development tooling, your agent can understand and interact with the environment. There are already excellent AI tools for creating applications, but many of them ultimately produce web apps. App Studio builds real Flutter applications with native performance and access to the full Flutter ecosystem and native platform APIs.

Importantly, there is no special App Studio project format. What you build is a normal Flutter and Serverpod project. If you later decide to install the traditional Flutter development environment and continue from there, simply open the project and keep working.

We are releasing Serverpod App Studio as a beta version for macOS today, with a Windows version coming soon.

A hundred times, thank you

Serverpod started as a small open-source project. Today, more than a hundred developers around the world have contributed code to the framework, and thousands of applications have been built with it.

Kali from ChecksOnMe on why they choose Serverpod for their backend.

Every pull request, bug report, feature request, Discord discussion, test, and example project has helped make Serverpod better. Serverpod 4 has been an enormous project, and we could not have built it without the community around it.

Thank you.

Build something real hackathon

Serverpod 4, Serverpod Cloud, and the beta of Serverpod App Studio are available today. To celebrate, we are launching a hackathon with $20,000 worth of prizes.

You can build any kind of full-stack application with Serverpod and Flutter. The hackathon is open to everyone, from agentic coders to professional developers, and you have five weeks to build your project.

Use the regular Serverpod developer tooling or Serverpod App Studio together with your favorite AI agent.

We cannot wait to see what you build.

Happy coding!