Hacker News Reader

Comment by suhail | Hacker News Reader

Fwiw, we had 5 customers pay $30/mo in the last 12 hours who have been trying Mighty for a few weeks.

Believe me, I was skeptical too. I remember sitting in a car driving back up from YC with Michael Siebel asking him: "Hey man, do you think I am absolutely nuts thinking people would pay for a browser that's FREE? That's an idiotic idea right?" and, of course, he encouraged me and I am still feeling pretty encouraged based on talking to users and seeing the revenue/usage/praise 18 mo later.

We have a lot of work to do and I am pretty embarrassed of what we've got still but it felt right to get public about it.

View on HN

Really interesting service.

Why might I use this instead of / in addition to Shadow (https://shadow.tech)? I'm a Shadow user, and they seem to give you beefier hardware at half the price, and it's a general purpose OS that will let you run any app (as opposed to "just" a browser).

Yep, this is exactly what I was getting at. Shadow is one of many examples of application streaming services which aren't limited to the browser and offer similar hardware (or even flexible hardware) at a lower price point.

Isn't Shadow basically going out of business? Pre-orders aren't estimated to be available until October and I thought I read somewhere that they are selling off pieces of the business.

There are 2 competing offers to buy the company, as I know of. One from OVH founder Octave Klaba, the other from JB Kempf, of VLC fame. So no, I don't think it should go out of business - in the short term.

Thanks for clarifying. Seems like a lot of companies in this space (at least the ones geared towards gaming) have had to pivot.

Looks like JB Kempf is the Shadow CTO

It's one great piece of tech, so I'm not surprised he'd be interested in trying to turn it around

From JB Kempf of VLC, and supported by Xavier Niel who is a huge VC in France and founder of Free, which totally disrupted the ISP mafia in France.

This video is a great interview of JB + story of Shadow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0c1CJT8X8A&t=20s

Thanks for the additional info, I had forgotten Niel was the backer.

JB Kempf (of VLC) has been CTO for a few months. He has submitted an offer to buy back the company with Xavier Niel (telco billionaire).

Their tech is incredible, by far the best performing IMHO.

Shadow is absolutely incredible. I can stream 4K 60HZ with 10ms of latency to a datacenter in a country nearby.

I think they are close to bankruptcy though, and signing up takes ages.

Interesting to hear this. I really want to use this service.

+1 I love their service, it's flawless and I often forget I'm using a stream. Then again, I'm on a wired Ethernet connection and a fiber line within 5ms of the datacenter so that probably helps.

What's actually crazy is that i even ditched my Ethernet cable and is running on a ubiquiti amplfi 5ghz router, and there is seemingly no difference in my location at least.

Technology is amazing.

Most people want an experience where the underlying OS and the application (the browser) interoperate seamlessly versus having to tame two desktop experiences. The primary application people think is slow is their browser by a wide margin so that's where we decided to focus as more native desktop apps become web apps. That focus lets us constrain the problems we get solve vs boiling the ocean with all of Windows.

Fwiw, we started by streaming Windows and pivoted away.

It's not clear to me that Shadow's business is sustainable. Windows licensing alone for virtualization across end-users if you buy from a reseller is $11/mo/user alone. I only know because we tried and became a reseller briefly. They also seem to use consumer GPUs that violate NVIDIA's licensing and agreements. Maybe they know something we don't.

> They also seem to use consumer GPUs that violate NVIDIA's licensing and agreements

They claim to, in reality they are sliced Quadro/Tesla cards that get a GTX 1080's worth of performance. I was wondering about the Windows licensing myself, not clear how they got around that.

Aren't VDA's cheaper?

Perhaps the rotate (?) the licenses somehow? That is, not every subscriber is active all the time? Imagine it as the public computers at the library. Maybe?

In any case, even at $20 p/m it feels like a strong value. That ~$1000 every four years - without ever being stuck with an out of date machine.

I'm not skeptical at all the people would pay for this. I worked on a cloud browser for seven years, there's a bunch of different market needs for this stuff. But $30-50 feels really high. We got feedback from enterprise customers that they were looking in the $5-15 range per user per month. That said, we pushed the security angle much more than performance, so the dynamics are a bit different.

Congrats on all the work here. Browser streaming isn't easy stuff!

Enterprise might say $5-15, but someone who controls their own budget and spends all day in the browser would easily pay more. Freelancers. Bootstrappers. The same way people pay for an IDE.

I agree they would pay more, but I'm still skeptical of $30-50. As I mentioned in a comment below, why limit it to the browser? If you've got all these resources just offer a full VDI which more typically prices in this ballpark.

> If you've got all these resources just offer a full VDI which more typically prices in this ballpark.

Perhaps their solution has something specific to the browser which allows them to do it really fast and cost effective. Eg. Sending just diffs of DOM to the client.

Maybe people are “enjoying” the Web in the way they consume $30-50/mo products, as if it is some fine movies or books, justifying the price.

With a VDI, you're stuck managing windows.

That would actually be a cool service: Mighty, but for running a hosted IDE.

But $30-50 feels really high.

Pricing is a good example of something that most people are intuitively wrong about. What you think people will pay and what people actually will pay are rarely congruent, and most of the time people guess far too low. Literally every bit of advice and writing about pricing I've ever read boils down to "Charge more than what feels right; you'll be surprised at how high you can go before you lose customers."

Also, 50% of the highest-paying customers bring more than 50%of the revenue, by definition. Often much more.

Apple keeps applying this strategy since 1990s.

Tesla bootstrapped itself off $80k cars, and only now is expanding to the "reasonable" $30k market segment.

You may not need everyone jump on your service just yet, you can start with the most needing it who are moneyed. Then you expand, economies of scale kick in, and you can introduce lower and lower price tiers, and people enjoy falling prices and getting a bargain.

Puffin Browser is $2/month or $20/year for an individual. $15/month is way too high.

For people who spend $250+ per seat in Salesforce, $30/mo for a blazing fast web design/coding/collaboration experience is - if anything - cheap.

Cue @patio11...

PS very impressed with MightyApp - joined the waitlist. Congrats :)

if you don't know any competing services offering similar services for years. then any price seems cheap.

but invite list, wooo, I got to get on it

Salesforce doesn’t have serious competition, unlike Mighty

a useful comparison is other proxy/cloud browsers and especially VDI. $30/user/mo seems normal in enterprise: https://www.nutanix.com/products/frame/pricing , citrix, ... . Frame and some others were a good perf+quality jump, and maybe mighty is/will be the next

positioning for consumer/prosumer is interesting and invites changing the math! opera was notable here as a web accelerator, but also a warning sign for pursuing this as a VC-funded businesses. the internet is bigger now..

good luck to the mighty team!

I wonder how M1+ Macs will impact your business, or whether anyone using one would benefit performance-wise from Mighty.

Not just M1. There is another thing on macOS that makes Google Chrome features faster and uses less RAM - native Safari.

Wondering if anyone did a test (speedometer or something similar) comparing Safari on average macbook vs $30/mo mightyapp.

Exactly, I always wonder how much Safari is faster than competing browsers. I have dozens of open tabs and it just works. With other browsers, I cannot even work after a certain number of tabs.

Microsoft edge has gotten very very good as well with sleeping tabs/ is light and all chrome extensions work seamlessly in edge

Indeed, I'm really bad at closing tabs. One day I wondered how many Safari tabs I had open on my pre-M1 2018 base model MacBook Air. I went into the tab preview pane and discovered it was around 480 tabs. Mind you this was in between system restarts so some were probably suspended or something, but still. I don't even notice with both IntelliJ and VSCode open as well.

People who don’t close tabs because they unconsciously don’t want to lose their search history.

At the end of the day your search history should be fed into a personal search engine which digests the data and figures out which pages were most useful to you (maybe by helpful browser buttons)…and uploads that into some open database. This can then be the basis for a new type of search engine.

It could be implemented trivially on something like Mighty, since everyones browsers run in the same datacenter.

As a reference, I've got more than 100 open tabs on this Firefox Android (it counts them up to 99 then it displays ∞) and probably another one hundred on my desktop (Ubuntu /Gnome), split on five windows on five different desktops. I can't assess the speed of Safari because it doesn't run on my hardware. It could be faster but those Firefoxes don't feel slow and don't slow down when the number of tabs increases. I don't have a really large number of open tabs though.

I expect to pay for this with high probability. I don't think I'm in the first target batch as I'm giddy in M1 land now, but I do work on so many different machines and love the idea of a persistent environment in the cloud. I also expect to want to do genomics in my browser at some point, and thus envision a need for 100x+ more powerful browser tabs.

What would you be doing that would require 100x+ more powerful tabs? I'd imagine most process-intensive work is already being done server-side or in a desktop app, not the frontend of a browser app.

Someday I want to run a whole world simulation. Think "The Sims" except the whole world. 8 billion agents, say a million bytes per person, so 8PB of RAM. While the sim is running I want to copy and paste the URL in a new tab and change a few params to compare the results. I want things to be instant.

Today I want to visualize 100,000 rows across 1,000 dimensions in 10 different tabs.

Between Today and Someday there are endless things I want to do.

But that doesn't really have anything to do with the browser, which is what the op was asking.

"I want to copy and paste the URL in a new tab and change a few params to compare the results."

You are not explaining your architecture. The parent (and me as it happens) assume that when you paste the URL and change params then that URL is sent from your browser to a server. The server runs the simulatíon based on the params in the URL it received and returns the results to the browser. With that architecture you would need a lot of resources for the server but not for the browser. What architecture are you thinking of?

Server is just a dumb nginx server sending HTML and Javascript. No dynamic routes. Everything happens clientside (main thread and/or web workers, local storage for persistence).

Same architecture as: https://v20.ohayo.computer/?filename=discovery-of-elements.o...

There has long been Puffin Browser in the cloud for $20/year, have you heard of it? https://www.puffin.com/secure-browser/

Still to early to think how to sell our [ we are in the very early stage] to sell our WebApp subscription as a bundle with MightyApp. But the price will be to high [add $15 for our side]. Waiting for the future when Linux and Windows ( sadly) versions arrive. Imagine the Arduino’s guys with this. Go buddy!

This is huge challenge BTW. I am dealing with electron kind of Web App and we are thinking in sell our subscription model with a bundle with MightyApp in the future waiting for the other versions Windows ( sadly) and Linux ( imagine the Arduino users ). Wait and see. The best for MightyApp!

I guess nobody wants to leave money on the table either. Easier to cut prices than hike them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com