Mike Harrington and Darrin Massena think that making an app with AI is still too hard.

While you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to build something for you, that demands at least some awareness of programming frameworks and hosting options. AI app builders like Replit and Cursor also aim to be professional-grade development tools for businesses, not something you’d use to quickly scratch a personal itch.

Harrington’s and Messena’s startup, Playful, wants to bring vibe coding to a much broader audience. With a handful of simple prompts, Playful will build web-based apps and games that you can push to your phone and share with friends. Users can create up to two apps for free and use them for up to 30 days, at which point the service requires a $10 per month subscription.

“It’s for an audience that is less technical, for an audience that until recently didn’t even understand that they could make apps,” Harrington says.

Playful isn’t the first company to try bringing AI app creation to mainstream audiences. The highest-profile example is Wabi, which raised $20 million last year to be the “YouTube of apps,” though it has since pivoted to be more of an app-powered personal AI agent (while raising another $55 million). The App Store is also awash in apps like Vibecode, Vibecoder, and VibeStudio, which look to varying degrees like they were made with AI themselves.

Harrington and Massena, who worked together on Microsoft Bob and later sold their photo editor startup Picnik to Google , are betting that a combination of social sharing features and their own expertise in software development will help Playful break through.

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