Zero information available on mobile.
I thought it is some kind of portfolio site that does not work on mobile.
It looks like some people who work there are watching this thread, so to them I say: You have got to explain what this is, not just say "the disk persists..." and expect people to dig deeper. Most aren't that curious.
Same, my first thought was that it's some pentesting game where you're given a VM and your task is to somehow break it. The line "the disk persists. you have sudo" sounds like game rules.
All the About page contains is:
> exe.dev is a subscription service that gives you virtual machines, with persistent disks, quickly and without fuss. These machines are immediately accessible over HTTPS, with sensible and secure defaults. You can share your web server as easily as you can share a Google Doc. With built-in optional authentication, so you can focus on your thing.
> Your VMs share CPU/RAM. Create as many VMs as you like with the resources you have.
Granted, navigation on mobile could be better – the “All docs” breadcrumb is the only way to find the pricing and rest of the docs. On desktop it is clearer.
Don't defend this. It's not plain. It's obtuse.
A properly designed plain site will have the following text front and centre on it's hero:
"virtual machines in the cloud with persistent disks and sudo, starting from $20/month."
SSH keys are required to access exe.dev.
How? It just says `ssh exe.dev`. Unless you are clairvoyant.
scroll down and hit the "about" link. I do agree though the landing page could be more resourceful.
I'm not going to SSH to a random server.
The disk and sudo mentioned are good enough clues, then you have the about.
> The disk and sudo mentioned are good enough clues
I mean, you do you and let's agree to disagree about a good landing page UX.
That’s probably the oddest thing to read on a tech VC forum.
The lading page was garbage. It’s forgivable because designing goods landing pages is hard. But inventing wacky ideas about why a bad landing page might have some hidden genius, isnt constructive feedback
Opening a random website likely exposes you to more risk.
Homepage -> blog -> docs -> "all docs" button:
Which has an about and pricing etc.
That is very counterintuitive to just find out what this is.
It's really annoying when you're interested in a product but can't find a price.
It didn't read as a company with products at all to me from the front page. Just a cryptic " The disk persists. You have sudo." with links to "Login" and "About * Blog * Discord" --- no pricing link, which made me think it was a weird hobby / art.
> ssh exe.dev
> The disk persists. You have sudo.
I've seen enough of these kinds of services in my lifetime that I also immediately knew what it was, for example sdf.org, which is one of the OG services, and various "tilde" services like tilde.town.
All this was totally lost on me from looking at the website. “I already have tilde and sdf, I don’t need this.”
If I hadn’t looked into the comments I would still think that.
> ssh exe.dev
> The disk persists. You have sudo.
on mobile
And cannot open keyboard if that is needed. It is like big CTA but does not do anything.
Very strange landing page for maybe cool product.
I think knowing what the ssh command does is a pretty low bar for this platform
it's fiine i think
... which it is.
I think it's the combination of 1) really quick to get going, 2) isolated and disposable environments and 3) can be persistent and out there on the Internet.
Often to get element 3, persistent and public, I had to jump through hoops in a cloud console and/or mess with my 'main' resources (install things or do other sysadmin work on a laptop or server, etc.), resources I use for other stuff and would prefer not to clutter up with every experiment I attempt.
Here I can make a thing and if I'm done, I'm done, nothing else impacted, or if it's useful it can stick around and become shared or public. Some other environments also have 'quick to start, isolated, and disposable' down, but are ephemeral only, limited, or don't have great publishing or sharing, and this avoids that trough too. And VMs go well with building general-purpose software you could fling onto any machine, not tied to a proprietary thing.
This is good stuff. I hope they get a sustainable paid thing going. I'd sign up.
Also, though I realize in a sense it'd be competition to a business I just said I like: some parts of the design could work elsewhere too. You could have an open-source "click here to start a thing! and click here to archive it." layer above a VM, machine, or whatever sort of cloud account; could be a lot of fun. (I imagine someone will think "have you looked at X?" here, and yes, chime in, interested in all sorts of potential values of X.)
I don't think that it's actually public? From one of their explainers, no public IP is assigned, so you'll need to ar least have to use an additional service like Cloudflare Tunnel to use it for hosting anything.
ssh exe.dev share set-public <yourvmname>It's very much a snapshot of what happens to come on a new VM today, and I put a little disclaimer in it to try to help tools get unstuck if anything there proves to be outdated or a flat-out (accidental) lie.
— $20/month
— 25 VMs
— 2 CPUs
— 8GB RAM
— 25GB disk
— 100GB bandwidth
Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain (too good to be true?); other cloud providers charge hundreds of dollars per month for an equivalent VM.
If, OTOH, it's 2 CPUs/8GB total, Hetzner offers an equivalent VM for about $5/month (with much more disk and bandwidth), and I'm not sure what the exe.dev value proposition is. (I'm also not sure why one would want to split 25 VMs across so few shared CPUs/such little memory.)
The goal is to reduce the marginal cost of creating a VM to zero. Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM.
(I will get a better version of this table online tonight.)
What is the advantage of this? Unless you need something exotic like different kernel configurations per instance, what's the problem with using containers on the same instance?
BTW, a Hetzner dedicated server with 2 CPUs/8GB RAM that would let me run my own hypervisor is about $14 USD/month. For anyone who's a big enough power user to care about the distinction of running distributed workflows on VMs versus containers, I'm not sure that an extra $5/month is worth your "hypervisor as a service." But then again, HN commenters infamously poopooed Dropbox [0], so what do I know? :-)
Consider this: sometimes when you are using a VPS, you start a new project and say to yourself, "I should put this on a new VPS." Not all the time, but it does happen. And when it does, we are faced with the problem that starting a new project immediately costs us $X/month. I would like a new project to initially cost nothing.
Is that possible and useful with exe.dev? The docs say:
On the networking side, we don't give your VM its own public IP. Instead, we terminate HTTPS/TLS requests, and proxy them securely to your VM's web servers. For SSH, we handle ssh vmname.exe.xyz.
> run docker compose
You can run multiple compose stacks in a single VPS.
> you start a new project and say to yourself, "I should put this on a new VPS."
I never did that.
But to your point: if a single VPS meets all your needs and you do not feel constrained by the marginal cost of another VPS then the exe pricing model is not going to bring you much value. Perhaps the automatic TLS termination and auth proxy with link sharing is useful. But if not, then it sounds like you are well served by existing products.
Asking for a friend…
exedev@scarlet-canyon:~$ rsync --version
rsync version 3.2.7 protocol version 31
Copyright (C) 1996-2022 by Andrew Tridgell, Wayne Davison, and others.
p.s. thanks for making Tailscale. And I'm loving exe.dev so far!
The only difference is the bandwidth: vps in europe givr you 10 tiles that, unmeterred.
Very cool for training: I can make people log into those vm and deploy nginx just for learning.
But my perception from the homepage is you can. Am I wrong?
Edit: it comes out of the box with screenshot capabilities. The defaults on this are very well considered. Im impressed within the first 15 min. Edit2: this is very neat. I will be recommending it to my non-coder friends who don’t really have the local setup to use Claude but would like to try a Claude-like tool.
Also, stop charging for SSO/OAuth2 integration. Seriously. There's a huge list of services that stupidly charge for SSO/OAuth integration at https://sso.tax, and this list needs to get smaller, not grow. SSO doesn't cost anything to implement. Especially if I'm the one hosting it on my own infrastructure.
But it was a choice that does not come for free. I dread a page of buttons for third-party services, and the control I give them over my life. I hate that I never know if I should log in with GitHub, or Google, and for a dozen services I have multiple accounts because I got lost in the miasma of oauth2.
Still, it was better than passwords!
But since the last product I built, the world has changed. We have passkeys now. Which are superior in every way for individuals using a third-party service. You get better UX. You get better privacy. It is a fundamentally better technology.
I did not list SSO under teams because I want to "tax" people. I did it because SSO only makes sense for businesses, where an administrator controls accounts, and can delete yours when necessary. There, oauth2 is the best technology we have. But for individuals, it is a dead technology. I am reluctant to make everyone's exe.dev experience worse for legacy tech.
Passwords are much better than the OAuth2 coolaid, and passwords will still be better as long as older devices can't support passkeys due to arbitrary restrictions.
Passkeys work great for me and I greatly prefer them. Exe.dev I think is the first service I've seen that's so passkey centric and it makes a lot of sense.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. I'm going to assume that it is, in fact, sarcasm. Because this is definitely untrue in reality.
I run a bunch of services for friends and family, things like Immich, wallabag, mealie etc. Less than 10 users, but do you expect me to crate and maintain separate accounts for each one for every service?
The SSO tax is stupid. If your whole business model is based on putting SSO behind a paywall, it’s a sign of a broken business model.
Trying my way around it now. Not sure what is going on:
me: apt install apache
the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found: "apt"
me: bash
the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found: "bash"
Thanks for trying it!
Oh, I think I found a real shell now! You have to click "VMs" then on the VM and then "Terminal".
Yay, this is great!
SSH is really the only protocol you can do shenanigans like that over, it's a shame not to use them.
[1] (seems overloaded right now) https://words.filippo.io/whoami-updated/
ssh crabmusket.github.exe.dev
I'm sure you've thought of this, but: lots of people have some amount of 'free' (or really: zero incremental cost to users) access to some coding chat tool through a subscription or free allowance like Google's.
If you wanted to let those programs access your custom tools (browser!) and docs about the environment, a low-fuss way might be to drop a skills/ dir of info and executables that call your tools into new installs' homedirs, and/or a default AGENTS.md with the basic info and links to more.
And this seems like more fuss, but if you wanted to be able to expose to the Web whatever coding tool people 'bring', similar to how you expose your built-in chat, there's apparently an "agent control protocol" used as a sort of cross-vendor SDK by projects like https://willmcgugan.github.io/toad-released/ that try to put a nice interface on top of everything. Not saying this'd be easy at all, but you could imagine the choice between a few coding tools and auth info for them as profile-level settings pushed to new VMs. Or maybe no special settings, and bringing your own tools is just a special case of bringing your own image or setup script.
But, as y'all note, it's a VM. You can install whatever and use it through the terminal (or VSCode remoting or something else). "It's a computer" is quite a good open standard to build on.
Is the chat descended from Sketch?
Re sketch: the code is not the same but the agent is deeply inspired by it. Eg the screenshot support, which just seems obvious to us. Philip has done the heavy lifting here, he hangs out in the discord if you want to chat about it.
Man, this brings me back. Kudos to you guys! Just find a better solution than Ceph or minio.
Also, telling Shelley to get inspiration from the VM name can be fun.
I love the idea of just ssh in and do your thing. I’ll bookmark and come back when there’s some more info. Things are going to move fast…
You can do the same thing - with the added burden of actually having to set it up once ... After you set it up, it's however just as trivial to add new systems like with this linked example.
I got pretty much everything I'm self-hosting like that via keycloak (which itself let's me do social with via GitHub and Google etc pp) and a very similar nginx config like it's shown in these docs.
But the initial setup took multiple hours, even if the adding new services which support forward/proxy auth is extremely easy now.
(Jellyfin sadly doesn't as an example)
Just saying it in case you want to check it out.
I think it's fantastic they added that/provide this to their platform - it's a wonderful value-add
The forward auth/proxy auth is not a keycloak feature, it's a proxy feature, which just need some identity provider. If you look for the mentioned term via Google or AI/llm you will find multiple options, some of which are as easy to setup as a simple docker run cmd with an open port
I.e. https://docs.goauthentik.io/add-secure-apps/providers/proxy/...