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Avo 4
New add-ons and framework improvements. Hover a row to pause it, then click any name to read more.
By Adrian Marin
- June 26, 2026 - 2,889 words - 15 min readAbout 2000 commits and 15 months in the making (a bit longer than we wished for), today we're releasing Avo 4 in General Availability.
About 50 teams have been testing it in a bunch of different configurations and edge-cases had just a few issues popped up. Not to say there haven't been any, but we can't not feel slightly impressed by that 😊
I want to talk to you today about a few things:
I want to say "a ton".
First of all the looks. We changed our dated theme to a more modern look which features support for color schemes (light and dark modes), neutral and accent color changes and soon full on themes.
That's all I wanted to say 😎
It runs on Tailwind CSS 4, uses CSS variables to map colors, spacing and layout and a skilled front-end dev (or an LLM) can make what they want out of it.
The layout has changed as well. We took inspiration after teams with better designers like Shopify and Statamic.
The spacing, typography, and colors have been greately worked on.
We've sweated on the mobile experience as well. We are trying to get as much as we can from every pixel on smaller screens.
Accesibility has been improved with a commitment for WCAG 2.2 going forward.
Dark mode is here with tuning for the neutral and accent colors.
Like I stated before, this is a total redesign with an emphasis on consistency and a functional design.
I (Adrian) am a big fan of keyboard navigation and Avo 3 totally missed this train with only one "internal" shortcut (try r+r+r). This has been a deep rabbit hole for me to get into. I started with simple things like annotating the controls (Back, Create, Edit buttons, and other standard ones) to annotating the actions dropdown and adding full arrow navigation to it.
Then, I noticed that I would love to be able to browse the records without touching the keyboard so I added Shift + t to focus the table (or grid) and then you can do up and down to browse the records with Return navigating to that record. Or you can directly use J/K to navigate without focusing.
Sidebar hiding has its own shortcut. Neutrals and accent colors + color schemes have their own shortcuts. Table, Grid, and Map views get a shortcut. Action controls get shortcuts. Resource search gets a shortcut. Global search gets a shortcut... you get the point.
It's almost VIM mode with Avo now.
You, and your users can see all the shortcuts by hitting Shift + ?.
Our Avo 3 to Avo 4 upgrade guide talks about all the DSL tweaks (which are also breaking changes).
We only touched those which needed touching. Those which needed adjusting to better APIs.
This has been a feature which we've built a while back for a customer and never released. It's coming just in time to create those nice kanban boards to manage your agentic processes 🫣
I bet some of you were waiting for this feature for a while now. It enables you to use the same def fields DSL to create on off forms where you can capture input form your users. Think of those feedback forms and settings screens.
Another long-waited banger. You can use Ruby code to have the UI respond to field changes 🙌
You can now give your internal tools the ability to respond to your users. Trigger notifications from any part of your app and you get the infrastructure to have seen/unseen, bookmarked, and "done" notification system.
This is your own mini chat window on every record helping your team collaborate and stay up to date with what is happening. You can also use it to have a sort of timeline of what's happening to those records with special listening hooks.
This is a big one. Imagine an Avo resource not backed by the database but by HTTP endpoints 🤯 Yes, you heard that right. You'll be able to hook up any JSON API to your internal tool in a very perfomant way. It supports reads and writes and of course most of the fields and resource options.
Another piece you can take out from your maintenance rotation. Avo now generates full-on REST-full JSON APIs fro your resources which you can use with other apps and your agents.
We took the time to extract all of the other features from a few gems which bundled them together to separate gems and addons so now you get to pick and choose which oens you want.
You'll see that the Global Search has been totally overhauled, and that the Resource Search is in-page now.
Besides the new features, there have been hundreds of tiny improvements in our existing addons like Dashboards, Dynamic Filters, Nested Records, Menu, Custom controls, and, of course, the main Avo repo
We are still polishing a few addons for release.
MCP Servers - Similar to the JSON API you'll have an automatic, authorized MCP server at your disposal.
CLI & LLM Skill - This is another bit that we can help with and generate for your a fully working CLI and skill for your LLMs to use in your teams workflows.
Meta - is an addon which enables you to add dynamic fields to your resource directly in your production app without touching code, no app deployment needed. Backed by an in-memory schema and the Database, it will enable you to have much quicker iteration times.
Dynamic Collections - Similar to Meta, you'll be able to create in-memory and database-backed resources right on your server. Imagine what you could do with that, the JSON API and an MCP server 💪
You'll notice that we've change the pricing structure altogether.
Instead of two rigid tiers which we had to "shove" new feature into and which had no real connection between themselves, we listened to a lot of your feedback and made a decision.
We un-bundled. Then we bundled, but I'll get into that in a minute.
No two apps are the same or require the same features and some features are more valuable than others. You all told us that in one way or another, and we kinda knew it but couldn't articulate it.
Now we did.
Every feature is an add-on. Pick and choose whatever you need.
After laying them all out "on paper" we figured that some have some commonalities so we bundled them together and offered a big discount versus what they would cost separately.
I guess most apps will start with the Essentials Bundle and move their way up.
Yup. And at some point we figured that some of you will just have the whole package so we created an Everything Bundle which gives you, well... everything.
We did do one thing different. We removed the perpetual fallback license. So when you stop paying the subscription, you stop using the product... just like every other SaaS product out there. From Basecamp to Gmail.
We had too many folks subscribe and cancel rendering the product to a single-use product.
We know. That's your first thought and probably got a bit mad about it.
"Why do I need to pay $20 every month for INSERT_YOUR_FEATURE_HERE?"
Well, because we worked a lot to bring all of this to life and still work on it to maintain, keep secure, easy-to-use, and improve. We work on it upfront and the customer pays in instalments... just like every other SaaS product out there 😳
"Yeah, but this is code, not a hosted service."
It's actually more than code. It's thinking about it, architecting it, building it, iterating through the bad decisions, collecting feedback, maintenance, security audits, making it work for everyone, etc.
We do that so you don't have to.
And, it's also a feature that it's code. You get to run it in your app. It's not a set of APIs where you call a product which is hosted in the cloud, jumping through hoops to make it bend the way you need it.
It's living where your app lives. You get to take control as much as you want to. You get to override partials, CSS, JS, Ruby business logic. Things which you can't do in a cloud product.
We don't think of it as "just code".
Also, it's a living piece of code. When something doesn't work, we fix it. We find a way to make it work. Again, we make sure it's secure and worthy of your trust.
So yeah. It's a subscription. It's the way we build a business, pay salaries, donate to open-source, create cool things like the Ruby Passport, and more.
We can't do that on a once-pay product, and from what we heard, nobody else really could.
Many of you took the leap and are on the latest Avo 4 beta and the upgrade will be a click of a button on avohq.io/projects/latest.
All Avo 3 users get a three-month 50% discount upon upgrading.
All Avo 3 users get a 14-day trial to test out the features and ensure their production environment works properly.
We know that not everyone is ready to jump on Avo 4.
Our answer: keep using 3!
When you're ready you can jump on Avo 4.
For as long as you pay a subscription you'll get access to updates.
We plan on supporting Avo 3 for a loooong time with security updates and critical bugfixes.
This is the question that baffled us from November to February.
"But Claude can write an admin panel in one prompt", "LLMs will code it from scratch better than any template", "Coding is solved".
This is what we've been hearing. And all of that is true... in some part.
We're developers. We use LLMs every day. It took us and the whole industry a while to figure out that even if those things are true, other things creeped up on us.
We don't always trust the code that LLMs are writing for us.
Sometimes it's a security thing (missing or wrong authorization, IDOR, SQL injections, secrets leaking, to name a few), sometimes it's a correctness thing (edge cases silently dropped: empty states, nil, pagination boundaries, timezones, money rounding, concurrency), sometimes it's plausible-but-wrong code (it compiles, it demos, then a subtle bug surfaces in prod three weeks later), sometimes it's performance (N+1 queries and unindexed lookups that pass in dev and fall over at real data volume), sometimes it's a misunderstanding (it built something different from what we wanted, missed the edge cases), sometimes it's destructive operations with no guardrails (no confirmation, no soft-delete, no audit trail, fine until someone bulk-deletes), sometimes it's a maintenance burden (every screen reinvents the same pattern slightly differently, so there's no single place to fix anything), sometimes it's hallucinated APIs or outdated idioms pulled from stale training data, sometimes it's the supply-chain surface growing (dependencies bolted on for one-off needs), sometimes it's the stuff it doesn't know to build (select-all across the whole filtered query not just the visible page, extra confirmation on sensitive models, sane bulk-action guardrails, the decisions it won't add unless you already knew to ask), sometimes it's complexity, sometimes it's privacy, etc.
It also leads to other things like decision fatigue, review bottlenecks, false confidence (you trust the code more, right when you should trust it less), the understanding gap (the slow erosion of anyone actually holding the system in their head), accountability gaps (when something ships broken, "the AI wrote it" isn't an answer your customers accept), and onboarding debt (inconsistent, pattern-per-screen code is brutal for the next hire to learn).
These are all real things.
And here's the part that took us the longest to name: the work didn't disappear, it moved onto you. The LLM writes the first draft in seconds, but now you're the security reviewer, the QA, and the maintainer for code you didn't write and may not fully hold in your head. The typing got cheap. Everything after the typing didn't.
This is where Avo earns its place. Think of your product as two apps: the one your customers see, and the internal one your team runs it from. Both are real software, both need security, edge cases, and upkeep, but only one of them is why customers pay you. The second app is pure overhead no matter how well you build it, so the smart move is to own as little of it as you can.
Avo is that second app, already built. It's like having us (and every other team using Avo) as a second crew that thinks about your internal tooling so you don't have to. The authorization, the query scoping, the guardrails on destructive actions, the select-all that means the whole filtered set and not just the visible page, the confirmation steps on the models that deserve them: those decisions are already made, read by people, and run in production by hundreds of teams. You're not hardening generated code, you're building on a foundation that's already hardened.
So no, you don't stop using LLMs, we don't either. You just stop pointing them at the one part of your app where a plausible-but-wrong answer quietly leaks data or deletes the wrong records. You let Avo carry the internal tooling, and you spend your prompts, and your review time, on the product that actually sets you apart.
That's the whole case, and it comes down to three things.
Time: ship the second app in an afternoon instead of a sprint, and never spend a maintenance cycle on it.
Trust: human-reviewed, used across hundreds of apps, supported by the people who wrote it.
Taste: it behaves like a considered product, not a stitched-together internal tool.
Avo gives you all three, on the app you were never going to win your market with anyway.
This is the best time there's ever been to build software. The boring parts get cheaper every month, and the thing only you bring, taste, judgment, gut feeling, and common sense, is worth more now than it's ever been.
Avo is where you get to spend less of that thinking time and budget on the stuff that doesn't move your business.
Fifteen months in the making, around 50 teams kicking the tires in every weird configuration they could find.
The new UI isn't a fresh coat of paint, it's a faster place to work: keyboard shortcuts for almost everything, dark mode, a layout we sweated down to the pixel on mobile. The addons, Forms, Reactive Fields, Notifications, Collaboration, Kanban, HTTP Resource, the JSON API, are each one less thing you build and babysit yourself.
And none of it came out of a prompt. There's a small team of real people behind this, with opinions, a slight obsession with keyboard navigation (that one's on me), and a stubborn refusal to ship something we wouldn't run ourselves. When something breaks, a human you can email (or post a GH Issue fixes it. That's the part that doesn't show up in a changelog, and it's the part we're proudest of.
Avo 4 is live today. Start a 14-day trial and have Avo 4 running this afternoon.
On Avo 3? The upgrade is one click on avohq.io/projects/latest, with 50% off for your first three months. And if you're not ready, stay on 3 as long as you like. We'll be right here when you are.
We can't wait to see what you build with the time you get back.
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