Vagon – Personal high performance computer in the cloud | Hacker News Reader

Vagon – Personal high performance computer in the cloud

vagon.io

49 pointshasancanyasar33 comments

Wow, mixing monthly and hourly pricing like that is borderline fraud. Especially when you advertise it as a $8/mo service when the actual price for a typical 160h work month is $215. For the cheapest option. That's 26x the advertised price! At that point, buying an equivalent computer yourself would break even in months. And it'd work without a stable internet connection!

Here in Sweden all taxis advertise the component prices, but the the most prominent price has to be the "Jämförpris" (comparison price), which is the price of a standardized "typical" journey.

And of course this has to use Intercom, in an even more invasive and annoying configuration than usual.

I suppose my only solace is that people have tried this idea before[0], and at least they seem to be well on their way to bankruptcy.

[0]: https://www.wycore.com/

I think you're looking at it wrong. The price for the base service (so storing your settings/app configuration) is $8 /mo while the usage itself is added to that. The pricing to me is pretty straightforward.

On a side note, do you really take solace in watching businesses go to bankruptcy? Why though?

When someone says "Starting at $8/mo" that usually means you can start getting something of value at $8/mo. In this case, that's false.

I wouldn't call it fraud, just confusing.

I wouldn't even call it that. Many services have base prices and additional usage prices.

You may call this expensive, but for things you need a few times a month it may make great sense. I'd even consider it if the base price wasn't that high (usage also seems like a bit much, but then again you're getting good power).

What I wonder the most about is how it compares to other cloud computing offers, as the nature of the offering doesn't seem that special and I'd most likely use it as a build server (although a media editing use case would be interesting as well, since it'd mean I wouldn't have to keep around a Windows installation, but then file transfer becomes an issue).

There are other services like this, mostly for gamers. Vagon is $1.29/hour, plus $8/month. There's no technical problem doing this, but it's an expensive service to provide. The pricing is usually too high to get a market. NVidia's GEForce Now and Google's Stadia are running at a loss for promotional reasons. The game industry's reaction to Stadia is that almost everybody who considered supporting it expects Google will cancel that service.

Is Vagon reselling AWS, or do they have their own data center?

Yes, we built vagon on top of AWS with goal of eventually supporting multiple cloud providers. Our thinking is there's already a reliable, state of the art network of datacenters around the globe for our consumption, it makes sense to use it.

It might make sense to use it, but why does it make sense to resell it? What are you adding to the equation and who is going to pay 1.29 an hour?

At work, we use Paperspace quite a bit for Desktop-as-a-Service in order to teach distance learning and in-person classes. We like not having to rely on our users having beefy(ish) laptops or being able to install software on them. The killer paperspace features for us, in no particular order, are:

1. Private networks -> keep classes isolated 2. Shared drives -> mount read-only class data 3. Create machine images -> build out the 'base' class image and spawn new instances from it 4. An API for spinning up and down

It seems like you are positioning yourselves as more for individuals and less for companies. It's not clear fo me from the landing page, but does Vagon require you download and install a client? Or is there a browser-only option? If we were to spin up, say 35 VMs, and then destroyed them a week later, is that $7.99/month charged for each machine or just once? Is it pro-rated if you don't use the whole month?

How do you remote into Paperspace instances? Is there a custom client that performs well? Every few months I'll tinker with setting up a Linux desktop in some generic cloud provider, but the lack of good remote desktop X solutions is always a pain point.

EDIT: after some more clicking around I managed to find references to a Paperspace "native app" for remote desktop. I may sign up for an account and give it a try, since I just noticed Vagon only supports Windows machines at the moment.

We generally use the browser interface, since many of our classes have both a GUI app and commandline work -- we've done this with both the Windows VMs and the linux ones. For linux desktop (Ubuntu), we use the ML-in-a-box image as our base and build on top of that. The linux VMs you can also SSH in via your favorite terminal/client

You are correct to assume we position ourselves to serve individuals. Because of this if you spin up 35 workstations, that would unfortunately mean 35 different subscriptions for storage. And yes currently the subscription price is pro-rated for the whole month.

Currently we only have the browser only client to connect to your workstation with native clients in development.

This being our beta launch, obviously we've a lot to learn and adapt about our customers so your feedback has been very useful.

Just wanted to mention that changing the tab name to "Steve says..." and back to your normal attention, just because the tab is in the background, feels like a terrible way of getting my attention. It's mostly annoying but then when I go to the tab, there is no Steve saying anything! Would expect something happened. But then putting the tab in the background shows the switching of tab name again. Not very nice UX.

Seems like a wrapper for, and should be compared with https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/

It may seem that way but I assure you it's not. You can tell by comparing our prices to workspaces and see that we're more affordable. When we started to work on vagon we did consider using Workspaces under the hood but opted to develop our own infrastructure on top of EC2 and our own display protocol instead of using Teradici PCoIP like Workspaces.

Nice interface and very easy to set up, it's great I could get to try it without entering any payment methods.

I actually need a Linux machine (for GIS with QGIS), it would be nice to get other OS options aside from Windows. I also wanted to sync my Dropbox folders but stopped short of typing my password in the VM after installing the Dropbox client, as I have no idea what kind of security you are using.

Something else, I had it in fullscreen mode on Firefox, but then every time I went back to my guest OS it triggered a resize of the guest, which was kind of annoying. Maybe it would be good to choose whether I want a scaled view.

We do have rolling out Linux machines in our roadmap, hopefully quite soon.

Thanks for the feedback about fullscreen mode I agree it is annoying. We haven't yet figured out a simple way to communicate that choice but it's absolutely necessary.

Regarding security: This is obviously a question we get a lot. We're providing you with an isolated VM, it's not a shared resource. Only you have access to it. We are basically managing backups for your data as file system volumes. We don't have any further access to it. Dropbox was pre-installed for convenience but I see how that may be suspicious.

Hey HN!

vagon is a personal cloud-computer that is built to help creatives with flexible performance. Architects, CAD designers, video editors, animators, researchers - they all need powerful computers to create things and that’s what we are trying to provide. Our goal is to make running graphics software such as Adobe or Autodesk products possible even from a Chromebook or a veteran Macbook Air.

After a lot of hard work, we've finally launched our beta. We’d love to hear your feedback and recommendations to make it better!

Through our web app, you can - create your personal vagon computer, - install your software, - sync your files, and use it as you use any other computer.

You can access your vagon anywhere - you only need a stable connection and a computer to use it.

P.S: We are currently on Product Hunt, you can visit our post and get a 2 months free coupon code to get you started right away.

Just a thought -- chromebooks are often being used in school setting as a cheap alternative to having an expensive Macbook Pro or something equivalent.

A student discount could go a long way.

We're working on it right now :) we plan to announce it in the coming weeks. Glad to see it makes sense to other people as well.

How do you differentiate from Paperspace Workstream[0] or Parsec Teams[1]?

[0] https://workstream.paperspace.com/ [1] https://www.parsecgaming.com/teams/

Who pays for the Windows licenses? Do I have to provide my own when setting up the VM?

This name really isn't the greatest.

Why are the specs not more configurable? You could offer it at a lot lower of a price if a costumer can get 16 GB of GPU without 244 GB of RAM.

So, like, AWS + remote desktop?

I think the idea is it comes pre-prepared for people who cannot spawn an environment from scratch on AWS or any other cloud provider for their purpose

To be fair AWS does offer that https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3. But, Vagon is somehow cheaper than AWS, which I almost never see.

As a non dev-opsy person, I do not think i can create an environment to use. To be fair though, I cannot understand amazon pricing compared to vagon's enough to have an opinion eitherway

Note: I have not used this service before.

I'm pretty sure this is an almost exact competitor to Vagon. You're not creating an environment. It's a full desktop right out of the box.

No, no, no. It's a serverless personal computer.

This is not serverless. If you're specifying specific units of compute that is traditional cloud computing.

It was a joke, but virtual desktops are capable of dynamic resource allocation. For example, you might see you have 32BG of RAM, but you won't be allocated the last 16 until you need them.

Sure - in the same way Dropbox is FTP + SVN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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