Show HN: Booste – a cloud-hosted desktop for developers
devs.booste.io
devs.booste.io
> 90% Off Device Cost
Only if you're not counting the subscription fees. A thin client ($150 according to you, and that seems to be on the low side) and a year of the $60 plan would cost $870. You can get a lot of laptop for that money, and it would last longer than a year. And it wouldn't be tethered to the internet.
> Booste apps have no speed limit. The elastic cloud delivers the processing performance you need, when you need it.
It's still running on hardware eventually, there will inevitably be performance limits.
> 100x Faster Peer-to-Peer File Sharing
How does that help you, if it then has to get to your computer in the least efficient format possible?
> Code, run, test, and deploy projects without changing your desktop workflow.
Or.. I could just do that from my desktop, changing even less.
> [No] Expensive laptops
See above.
> [No] software installs
Read as: no flexibility.
> [No] updates
You might not be told that they're happening, but the continuous detereoration will still be there. But now you can't even do anything about it!
> [No] dependency conflicts
I'm almost surprised it doesn't claim to solve world peace.
> [No] virtual machines
Presumably it's running in one?
> [No] OS compatibility
Nonsense. You're only running Windows 10, and adding even more compatibility problems on top of that.
I use Google's web based IDE to write code (at work), and it is a game changer. I can pick up where I left off from any device (that's not a phone). I used to be a die hard intellij fan, but now I never use it.
Why? Because it's not in the cloud.
Pricing could reasonably drop to $15/monthly for the unlimited plan, once I reach scale. The current system is not at all cost optimized; each user is a significant cost to me. Economies of scale and cloud-side tech has not been built out, because Booste is pre-product-market-fit and simply assessing interest.
The web-based-IDE "Game Changer" is very interesting, and a direction I've considered. Flexible and customizable compute backend. Would be curious to learn which IDE you're using.
but there are a plethora of online IDE's that can integrate well with GCP.
I miss Bespin, it later became skywriter, and was eventually integrated into the ACE online editor. For the few times I needed to edit something on the go, and didn't have my laptop, it worked wonderfully. I was not a big fan of the direction it took, moving away from what I would consider a fully opensource platform, to a paid one, but it does its job, and it does it well.
GCP cloud editor uses Eclipse Orion. I am excited to see the expansion of the project, and the direction it takes. Cloud IDE's have always been badass.
- A friend just had to use similar BS when he started at another company and I am already excited about all the funny stories he'll tell me
- We can already minimize resource consumption by using apps and OSes which are more efficient. While Win10 is total crap for example, a laptop from 2005 still works as a decent Dev-machine with Linux on it (it basically costs <200$ and you can upgrade it to some degree)
When I read about these ideas I imagine people sitting in front of their 2000$ Apple-MBP's just to connect to some AWS-shit that costs even more just "to be able to work" - it's kind of funny but also stupid.
The intent is not to sell snake oil. I have a free version available for users to assess the product themselves and make that decision. If you personally got into the system, launched a desktop, and were unsatisfied, please email me at erik@booste.io or call me on my personal cell (331) 262-8169.
Booste currently only runs on Windows machines, and runs Windows apps. I have updated the plans page to more clearly reflect this.
I am actively developing this for other device platforms, starting with Mac and Linux on the device side, and Linux environments on the cloud side.
I'm the sole developer of this product and wrote the first line of code only three months ago. I appreciate your patience. My intent is not to mislead - it is to paint the vision.
I'd need to be able to open multiple terminals and install semi-random programs though. It's not clear to me if that's fits in with your vision.
Its pretty good for coding on the go (with vim) but for multiple terminals you might be better off using screen or tmux. I can even deploy on the command line because of gcloud and gsutil cli toolchains.
Your Emacs workflow is one I'd happily replace with a proper GUI (VSCode, etc).
The current iteration is quite literally a full remote desktop, onto which you can install any semi-random program you'd like. In fact, there's even a "Barebones Windows" desktop available, with no installs, for you to flesh out as you please. Multiple terminals are totally cool too!
That said, the long-term vision is to make the apps you use seem local, so there's no context-switching. I'd like Booste to just be a wrapper around the app - if I could eliminate the desktop on the server end and simply capture the application window, that'd be the most seamless experience for users who are not used to context-switching into remote desktops.
First-time poster here, excited to show you what I've been working on. I'm a recent mechanical engineering grad and self-taught developer. I thought it was a pain in the ass (can we swear on HN?) to walk to a campus computer lab whenever I needed to do 3D CAD or run intensive simulations or code scripts. My less-than-powerful laptop became preventative in my work.
I built a simple-to-use remote desktop system, with popular engineering apps pre-installed, hosted in the cloud. Now, I'm able to run CAD (Autodesk Fusion 360) and development tools (Android Studio) from a $200 device. I think it's silly that the up-front cost of a workstation can prevent software and mechanical engineers from doing their work.
I threw together a free version for your feedback, and I hope to hear your opinions! I'm interviewing for YC W20, so your honest thoughts (and potential usership) would be fantastic.
Cheers! Erik
I had not expected submissions to surge as much as they have, and had not built proper encryption into the user signup flow.
I recognize the issues here and am glad you called them out. To respond: 1) I've changed the web form to gather emails as a waitlist until I properly handle new user submissions. 2) I'll develop acceptable user account creation. 3) I'll give current users the ability or change their credentials under the proper system.
My truest apologies for this oversight, and thank you.
Quite curious about how you keep the latency low enough that it to type in an editor.
To get the product together as fast as possible (first line of code written three months ago), I actually did not reengineer the remote desktop protocol. In fact, the current product simply gives you the IP and password info to plug into your Windows Remote Desktop client app.
Future plans are to integrate RDP into the Booste app, to make the experience seem more native.
After that, I'll be implementing the modern H.265 protocol used by videogame streaming companies such as Vectordash and Nvidia GeForce Now.
Are you sure that's the right solution?
Remote desktop is able to render sharp fonts because its sending a lot of desktop contextual information over the wire, as opposed to just doing a dump "capture the screen, encode it, and send" like the videogame streaming systems do.
In a videogame, you can get away with small fringes on things (compression artifacts) but it would be quite jarring in your text editor.
I've actually ran into this with the NX protocol (NoMachine) before, and it's one of the main reasons I went away from it.
Using VNC on a LAN isn't great, but over WAN it's a truely miserable experience.
It really all depends on which use cases I end up focusing on. The initial idea was for 3D design (IE Solidworks), in which case the H.265 protocol would handle the more graphical, non text-based, visuals. This HN launch was to test out the developer markets, and it seems to resonate enough where I'd consider a way to transmit and render text as text rather than a screen capture.
I already tether a GPU to the encode side for the 3D design apps, but I'll certainly need to rebuild for scaleability in the future.
I thought it might have been https://www.spice-space.org/ which is GPL2.
Amazon workspaces seems to use RDP
Engineering priority #2, following multi-device-support, is to tackle the streaming challenge.
I'm trying my best, as a solo founder, to not build out features until they're requested, so consider "Faster Streaming" to be requested!
If you're technically interested, I serve up a 2xl sized instance, tethered to a medium GPU, regardless of the app used. It's costly to me, so in the future, I'll be finding ways to dynamically size vCPU and vGPU based on workload.
Wow, those are pretty expensive; I'd assumed it would be a medium or large instance!
Hmm, not sure which series of 2xlarge instance you mean, but even with the cheapest that supports Elastic Graphics, doesn't that mean that a user on the Unlimited plan could cost you over $300/month, while you charge them $60/month?
Maybe I'm calculating something wrongly here?
Also, on the Intermediate plan it says "App Sessions Capped At 6 Hours" - what exactly does that mean though? Does it mean I can use it at most 6 hours in a day, or does it mean I get cut off every 6 hours but can immediately reconnect if I want to?
Medium instances would be appropriate for IDE use cases. I upped to 2xl to handle 3D design tools, but with the recent interest out of the developer community, I can readjust myself downward from 2xl to medium or large.
You get cut off every 6 hours (instance spins down automatically based on your plan). Immediately, you can spin it back up and reconnect for another 6 hrs. The same applies to the free tier, at a 1 hr cap.
All apps currently offered are free licenses, with the exception of the Adobe suite and Autodesk Fusion. For those, you follow a workflow as if you were doing it on your own device.
For Adobe, you're prompted to enter your personal license info (Bring Your Own License). Adobe limits your usage to a certain quantity of devices per license, and it recognizes the app in the Booste cloud as a uniqe device, prompting you to log out of your other devices if you've reached capacity.
For Autodesk, I actually just provide the download link for the software, leading you through the process to properly do the download and license compliance yourself as if you were a traditional desktop user.
I understand that this answer may not be enough, and will be diving deeper into the implications. Thank you.
This idea was actually the first idea for Mighty before I pivoted a few months ago.
macOS can only be run on Apple hardware btw. That also makes the cost structure for this kind of business complex.
Good luck!
Currently using Windows 10 Servers on user-dedicated EC2 instances, so costs are bundled in, but once I get into a multi-tenant setup and cost optimization I'll see what I can work out with Microsoft.
Serverside MacOS is a nut I'm not trying to crack at the moment. Too many lawsuits of people trying to monetize Apple products.
Lastly: Mighty is an excellent move. The macro shift toward cloud-native makes browser-based tools more pervasive. You're well-positioned with Chrome, mate.
Ouch, that sounds expensive! I would imagine the economics of this will be a tough sell compared to one's own laptop or desktop?
Good luck, but note that you are competing with Microsoft (who offers Azure Virtual Desktops), so they aren't likely to want to work out a favorable (for you) deal.
My advise is to focus on one particular workflow (say vscode with Js) and perfect that one.
The product currently available is a full-fledged remote desktop, forcing you to switch back and forth, which can certainly be sucky.
The plan is to make the remote-hosted apps pop up as a window on your local machine, as if it were running locally, when really it's hosted and ran on a cloud VM. I want the apps (VSCode, for example) to seem completely local.
Would this better accommodate your personal workflow?
The vision of the next build is to launch and display apps as if they were local. IE: you click the app icon and a window opens up, without you even needing to context switch into a remote system.
I imagine it will be tough to compete with AWS and Microsoft - I wonder if there is a niche you can specialise in?
It's an amazing tech and just needs to be packaged up in a non-intimidating, non-intrusive way for laymen to use.
(Although millstone's comment makes me wary to suggest you do anything with Adobe's software...might want to be careful there)
Email me at erik@booste.io - I can have an Ubuntu version packaged up for you within a week.
I'd like to broadly respond to the many positive and negative comments made in this post.
Product definition: -- Booste is currently a tool to spin up a full-fledged remote desktop. You access it via a third party RDP client. The full product vision is to make individual apps run remotely, yet seem local. Primary use cases, learned here, emphasize the need for cross-platform access and flexibility. Surprising learnings include a de-emphasis on the device cost-savings.
Product maturity: -- Booste is an MVP, built entirely by me over two months. My intent of this post was not to mislead with large promises, but to assess interest in the value proposition so that I make something people want. The comments, new user signups, and feature requests have been strong validation of this. Now, there's building to be done!
Product distribution: -- The initial build, launched here, had infrastructure and security components that did not scale. Following valid complaints, I've temporarily replaced the direct-download on the site with an email waitlist, so that incoming interested users can get access in the near future.
This was great. Cheers, all. Please contact me at erik@booste.io with any and all thoughts around this.
Speaking of things in the cloud, I wrote a small thread about the pros and cons if everything is in the cloud (mainly inspired by Mighty):
Being a terminal machine, you don't own or hold anything.
The Adobe Venezuela case is a good example for that. So if booste.io needs to comply to some regulation it might break those users ability to access their data.
It is a growing concern as the terminal/main-frame days are getting back at us.
Other than that, I've said how the cloud is like a terminal machine (as you've said). Once it's gone, you're left with on-device things to do now... which is a huge con, but there are some pros as I've described in the post. But given the number of pros and cons for both cloud and on-device, it's a hard decision/strategy to make up on what a company is going to do.
I've caught wind of Suhail already and am actually really excited to see what he does with it. In fact, I hope to meet with him soon. If Mighty and Booste help consumers shift their hardware to the cloud, we build the market for each other.
Suhail, let's meet.
Does that not do what you need?
Recommended. Only reason I don't use it anymore is that Azure DevOps now offers MacOS build agents.
I'd need to work out a licensing agreement with them first. Very encouraging and validating to have your interest in the cross-platform aspect of this though! I'll dive in.
It'd take some rearchitecting to offer trial sessions in that way, but if this project gains momentum, we'll find a way to offer trials without signup, to reduce friction.
I actually never expected to support VS Code or any dev tools at all! Launched on Product Hunt a month ago targeting 3D design and animation markets. Yet strangely, 25% of my inbounds were directly requesting VS Code, so apparently there's a need.
Does your website say that "Booste runs your slow as fuck apps for you." ??
Judging by your response, it was not in good taste. Curious to anyone else reading this: is a statement like that offputting?
"this is an early stage product I might consider using", to...
"this is a weekend hobby project hacked together that I should definitely not pay for or depend on for anything business related".
Some companies can pull off the very human feel, but it takes a lot of effort to do well without trashing a brand.
It's probably not a smart move based on the other comments I'm seeing, but if you want to market things to the niche I'm in, you might find some success with it.
By the sounds of the other comments on here (and the fact that you’re getting downvoted for even asking, to which I can only think “wtf?”) I suspect you’re better off rephrasing that particular line.
And I say that as a Scot, where swearing is basically part of the vernacular - it's just not appropriate in a marketing setting.