While PageKite definitely offers a great way to expose your local web app to others, we want to get rid of the local setup process altogether, so developers can just spin up an environment using our service and start working from their favorite machine.
Our initial target is newer web developers who may find the setup process daunting, or developers who may manage several projects but don’t want to worry about about the details behind setting up different web frameworks and adding new services. As many can attest, setting up Rails isn’t exactly easy, and it can be even worse if you’re not familiar with the command line, or don’t have xcode installed.
We're definitely working on ways to allow developers to work privately and avoid publishing by default.