Posted by TheTaytay 1 day ago
I hate when i see fun side projects that cost the same as full subscriptions to other products. There's only a handful of $15/m services i "want" in my life.. it really raises the barrier to entry when i'm so aware and averse to subscription costs.
Yet $2/m? Instantly sold on that price. It's a fun price, it looks like a fun product, it lines up perfectly for me. It's silly that the price has me almost more interested than the product. Love it
Thanks for this, i plan to try it out!
Any thoughts on how the review will happen when that barrier is reached?
Really glad to see more projects like pico.sh embracing low cost, no frills, indie services. https://99.dev
Further, we are mostly targeting individual/small teams who want to rapidly prototype on the web. We provide enough convenience features (e.g. zero-install, multi-region, site analytics, tunnel connect/disconnect notifications, easy script automation) to entice users to keep their prototypes running in "prod" as long as possible before they feel the need to provision their own VPS.
We could go upstream and try to target larger teams/companies, but honestly, this is just fun for us to do on the side.
We don't make any guarantees about uptime at this point but we take it very seriously (we have alerting and respond quickly) and treat it like our day-jobs (I work at a paas and antonio is a platform engineer wizard).
And the two authors, qudat, and antoniomima are active on HN, as their responsive comments here demonstrate. Just good work all around.
Happy to answer any questions!
I noticed this mention here [0]:
Because in our Go SSH server we re-implement rsync, many options are currently not supported. For example, --delete and --dry-run are not supported.
Upload your static site to us:
rsync --delete -rv ./public/ pgs.sh:/mysite/
Would you be willing to share how it’s doing on the business side? Hints on how you’ve grown users or how many folks are willing to subscribe?
I’d love to build a service (in a different domain) that operates as simply as this.
Yes, absolutely. Here's our year-end-review where we talk numbers: https://blog.pico.sh/status-011
Ultimately, what keeps us going is we want these services to exist for our own side-project development and it's an extra boost of motivation when others use our services.
All of our marketing is through HN/lobsters/reddit since that's our target demo.
A ssh or TUI frontend for some git/forge host like: https://forgejo.org/ would be pretty cool!
Also, take it from someone who has been running services over port forwards for years. You want to set ClientAliveInterval and ClientAliveCountMax in sshd_config on the server (if you have not already). Users should be encouraged to set ServerAliveCountMax and ServerAliveInterval In ssh_config on their machines. Furthermore, it would be best if the tunnels were run by daemon tools and had ExitOnForwardFailure set as part of the command that is run. The ssh command used at the client side likely also should set -nNT. It is also good practice for the machines running ssh to have dedicated accounts for the tunnels such that their daemon tools scripts are essentially two lines, a shebang followed by exec setuiduid user ssh -i ...
Finally, if people want to do very low overhead and highly secure setups, they should bind the services that they reverse forward to unix domain sockets locally and reverse forward the local unix domain sockets over ssh to remote unix domain sockets. They can use a file mode sticky bit on the parent directory to make the local Unix domain socket accessible by the ssh command running on its own user, which locks things down locally fairly nicely. A typical process running on the machine will not be able to talk to the reverse forwarded service thanks to the Unix file permissions. Lastly, using ed25519 or ecdsa ssh keys would make the initial connection process very quick compared to using RSA.
sish was actually my first foray into SSH apps. It was a lot of fun to write and pretty much implements tunnels with a routing system on top. It manages connectivity, routing, and reverse proxying all within user space. No namespaces required!
tuns can actually even tunnel UDP traffic over SSH, also entirely in user space. Docs for that can be found here: https://pico.sh/tuns#udp-tunneling
Where are your servers located?
What about TOFU and MITM would you like them to respond to? TOFU isn't inherently a bad thing. Neither is MITM. It depends on the threat model, the actors involved, etc.
Your comment (and the snarky followup) imply they're doing something wrong, but it's unclear what.
You can receive their public keys out-of-band through an https-authenticated connection. Which means their approach to "the initial trust problem" is _not_ "trust on first use".
Currently their host key page is only linked once at the bottom of their page and isn’t referenced in any onboarding docs, so effectively onboarding encourages “yolo”, and if users aren’t savvy they’re likely putting other things at risk, whatever their keys happen to also have access to.
The other argument that comes up here then is “well mitms are rare so this doesn’t seem like a big problem in practice”, however there are actually great targets here, for example you go to a conference and hijack the WiFi, then spend your time in hallway track advertising these services to your targets. This kind of thing has a high success rate.
The web improves on this problem with PKI, though similar phishing tactics exist in a similar situation where you encourage people to sign up explicitly guiding them to an incorrect domain, but propensity for using search in address bars strongly helps resist this too.
SSH is terrible for this use case, no matter how it makes people feel.
I run a B2B SaaS. Support costs is what eats you alive: in case of a complex B2B app anything below $40/month is unsustainable. This is of course better for simpler apps/services, but even there you have to be super careful.
It does also mention there is a $0 "Starter" tier.
(I found that link on this page:
EDIT: Mention the Starter tier.
In terms of the costs to run a saas, we are actively monitoring hardware utilization and resource allocation. Antonio and I have a lot of experience building and running saas (and paas) products so we feel confident we can manage whatever usage comes our way. We have also been strategic in terms of the services we provide in an effort to keep service support manageable.
I agree to an extent. But it largely depends on the complexity of your offering. If all you do is expose flat data through an API, you can maybe get away with an API Gateway x Lambda x DynamoDB combo, which would cost virtually nothing as the free tier is very generous.
Just my 2c.
Back in early 2000s I ran a shared webhosting business, most customer's were savvy at the time and it was kind of a "you're on your own, let me know if the infra is acting up" type arrangement. I ran it with about 2000 customers for a year or so solo and only got about 2 support emails a day. Back then, 24-72 hour response was acceptable so I never needed to be a 24/7 resource.
Currently you can get some basic email, web hosting, etc. for a one time $1 donation. You can get more for a one time $36 donation.
They also have internal “forums” and chat and such as well as offering a bunch of related services like VPS, dial up, VPN, a Minecraft server, etc. Realistically, you can get a lot more for a lot less with modern hosts but between nostalgia and the limited environment having a particular kind of charm, it is kinda neat.
I joined SDF last year and was disappointed. I was willing to tolerate the limitations (eg. can't change your shell unless "validated"; can't even 'touch' a file...) in exchange for community but it's a ghost town. To make matters worse, IRC for new users is only available on a Sunday!
I would love to give it another shot but I don't understand what its value is in 2025.
Going to poke at it this week myself. Looks like a healthy competitor to PikaPods for the basic stuff.
Keep up the good work!
> Promotion/rollback support > Managed HTTPS for all projects > Promotion and rollback support
"Promotion and rollback support" twice...