Super cool concept - as someone who is just learning Python I've found Jupyter to be a great way to code and debug live. But yea it's hard for me to share that with someone as a beginner coder - are you planning on having this be a paid feature?
Mercury will be open source. I plan to create a cloud service for easy deployment. There will be free and paid tier. Mercury is AGPLv3. You can buy commercial friendly license as well.
We released Mercury V2 this week. The V1 was using YAML to generate widgets. The V2 is using Python to add widgets in the notebook. Widgets can be used during development and in web app.
There is simple cell re-execution after widget update.