Pico.sh – SSH powered services for developers

Traffic isn't actually that expensive outside of big clouds. No idea where pico is hosted, but Hetzner gives you "unlimited" 1Gps connections with a dedicated server, or a 10G uplink charged at $1.20/TB (plus a fixed monthly fee for the uplink itself).

Thanks for the comment because I think many -- including myself -- resonate with this sentiment. Our pricing strategy was to be competitive with a user just provisioning their own VPS VM with a cloud provider. Our goal is to be competitive on price with a $5/mo VM.

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).

For static sites is there that much missing? Throw a good CDN in front of this and would it matter much who the host was?

Woops! Delete is supported, will update that as well

https://pr.pico.sh/ and https://github.com/picosh/git-pr :-)

Yep! tuns would be the service you want since it can support forwarding arbitrary backends: https://pico.sh/tuns#custom-domains

> 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?

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.

Correct! The tunnels are protected using ssh auth as well, so you can ensure that only the users you want to access it can.

Cloudflare makes that free through their zero trust stuff and cloudflared daemon.

Ashburn, VA and Nuremberg, DE!

Our host keys are published here and are durable: https://pico.sh/host-keys

https://pico.sh/file-uploads#how-do-i-delete-files

Well, but that API Gateway x Lambda x DynamoDB combo will not answer support E-mails, will it?

Especially with B2B, it's easy to underestimate the support load for non-technical issues.

I'm thinking not much support is needed for user's that are willing and able to do all these tasks over SSH. They've pre-filtered for low support load

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.

If you think you can run a business with 10 high-skilled employees on $40,000 of revenue per month, boy, have I got news for you :-)

Similarly, if you think 1000 B2B SaaS subscriptions is an easy-to-achieve number, I'd wager a bet you haven't run a B2B SaaS business.

Roughly, the calculation is: at $40/month, a single subscription brings in $480/year. That means you can safely afford to spend roughly one hour of support on a subscription PER YEAR. If you spend more than 2h, you are definitely in the red. And you will get support requests, of all kinds: the ones you expect, and then all the stuff about lost passwords, inability to log in, network problems, lost invoices, requests to change the billing period, requests for invoices from last year for a customer that has since canceled and been deleted, data export/import, etc.

People who haven't run a business routinely underestimate the costs of running a business and imagine that these numbers mean that business owners are buying yachts and private jets. People who have run a business realize that it's much more difficult to make ends meet than it seems.

Yeah I think this why "Book a call" level customers are really subsidising it. Say $10/m/u and you get 200 seats. You pay $2000/m but the bugs you hit are likely uniform so you loaf support like maybe 20 individual users. 20 individual users only bring in 10%. So you need the whales to keep it going.

It basically dates back to when having access to a Unix system meant that you needed to be at a university or a big employer or some such. These guys provided one for free.

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.

A NGFW, frequently used in the enterprise environments will block it. They are checking the package signatures, not only the YCP ports.

Not sure if it has to go that far. Probably it's just blocking port 22.