Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today announced major enhancements to Catalyst by Zoho, its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), bringing agentic development capabilities directly into the coding environments developers use.
The additions include Agent Skills, a non-interactive command-line interface (CLI), and Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, alongside integrations for agentic AI coding assistants including Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. As part of the announcement, Zoho is also making Catalyst completely free for students developing non-commercial applications, giving them access to full-stack hosting, functions, database and AI tooling without requiring a subscription or credit card.
Catalyst by Zoho bridges the gap between code generation and reliable deployment by giving agentic AI coding assistants a structured way to build and deploy applications. Developers can use the AI coding assistants of their choice while Catalyst provides the underlying full-stack serverless infrastructure and controls, reducing the need to stitch together multiple cloud services and vendors. This helps simplify development and future iterations while reducing operational complexity. The platform is built for system integrators and software firms building custom solutions, as well as indie developers looking to move from prototype to production without managing infrastructure themselves.
“In a very short period of time, AI coding assistants have transformed how quickly applications can be created, but moving that code into production reliably remains a challenge,” said Kehinde Ogundare, Country Head, Zoho Nigeria “Developers still spend significant time managing infrastructure and bringing together separate cloud services. With Catalyst, we are reducing that friction by providing an agent-ready, serverless full-stack platform that helps developers build, deploy and scale intelligent applications with greater control and less operational overhead.”
“Making Catalyst free for students is about giving the next generation of developers the opportunity to move beyond learning how to code and experience what it takes to build and deploy complete applications,” said Bourne/Ogundare/Natarajan. “By removing the cost barrier and giving students access to full-stack development and AI capabilities, we want to enable them to experiment, build practical skills, and turn their ideas into working applications.”
Turning AI-Generated Code into Production-Ready Applications
While AI coding assistants can generate code quickly, getting applications into production still requires platform knowledge, cloud services and deployment workflows. Catalyst brings these elements together on a single serverless, full-stack cloud, providing AI coding assistants with the capabilities needed to build, test and deploy applications.
Catalyst Agent Skills gives coding assistants the context needed to understand Catalyst services, architecture and recommended development patterns. Instead of leaving the model to determine how the platform should be used, Agent Skills guides the assistant towards the appropriate capabilities and workflows, helping generate more accurate and verified output.
The non-interactive CLI allows AI coding assistants to execute multi-step workflows in Catalyst from start to finish without requiring human input at every stage, reducing manual intervention and helping developers move faster from coding to deployment.
The Catalyst MCP server gives AI coding assistants direct access to Catalyst capabilities from developers’ existing environments. Tasks such as creating a database table or adding a column can be performed from VS Code, Claude Code, Cursor or other AI IDEs without switching to the Catalyst console.
Orchestration built into Agent Skills connects these capabilities, deterministically routing requests through the appropriate CLI or MCP path. This reduces the risk of incorrect tool selection and helps developers produce more reliable, production-ready applications.
To strengthen developer trust and transparency, Zoho has made the AI skills available as an open-source repository for developers to be able to inspect and further add to. Zoho is also open-sourcing Catalyst’s SDK (Software Development Kit), CLI, as well as its lightweight Javascript Framework, Slyte.
Governance with Human Oversight
As AI becomes a greater part of application development, Catalyst keeps human oversight within the deployment process. Development and production environments remain separate, with code promoted to production manually, ensuring AI agents cannot directly access production environments.
Scoped collaborator controls define who—or what—can participate in development and the actions they can perform, while full audit trails provide application, platform and MCP tool-call logs. This allows developers to track the actions taken by AI agents and when they occurred. Changes after launch are also versioned, attributable and reversible.
Applications built on Catalyst run within Zoho’s own data centres and inherit its security infrastructure, including DDoS protection, SOC compliance, regular vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT), and a web application firewall.
Pricing and Availability
Catalyst by Zoho offers a monthly free tier for developers to explore the platform, plus NGN 192 500 in free credits for users who want to go deeper over a six-month period. Catalyst is available for immediate use.
Catalyst continues to offer a straightforward pay-as-you-go pricing model, with every feature bearing a per-unit cost rather than a license fee layered on top of usage. Developers get full visibility into usage from the Catalyst console and can set budget alerts and ceilings to prevent unexpected bills. A structured subscription option is also available for teams that prefer predictable costs.
Catalyst remains completely free for students, with no subscription or credit card required to deploy non-commercial applications.
Zoho’s Privacy Pledge
Zoho respects user privacy and does not run on an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. The company owns and operates its own data centers, giving it full oversight of customer data privacy and security.
More than 150 million users worldwide, across more than 1 million paying organisations, rely on Zoho to run their businesses, including Zoho itself.
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