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Comment by stephc_int13 | Hacker News Reader

They simply didn't reveal the business model yet.

The $50 subscription is to avoid flooding their servers while testing the software.

This product will likely starts as a corporate malware but once the beta is over and their tech is really working at scale (more difficult than you might think) they'll probably give it for free or very cheap.

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> they'll probably give it for free or very cheap.

They wont give away this for free:

> Each browser instance gets 16 vCPUs using state-of-the-art Intel CPUs running at up to 4.0 GHz.

People would mine bitcoins with it. Not to mention they'd be footing more than all of youtubes bandwidth costs if this gets popular.

If won't happen overnight, but if they are successful with this tech it simply won't make sense to put friction in front of it.

My IMMEDIATE reaction to this was someone is gonna pay $50 a month to possibly make more money than that mining cryptos on the browser. JS crypto miners are already there now they just need to pay some numpty to run a browser somewhere with more resources. They're even offering GPU-level processing!

> This product will likely starts as a corporate malware but once the beta is over and their tech is really working at scale (more difficult than you might think) they'll probably give it for free or very cheap.

So you think it is a dragnet-surveillance get-acquired-for-our-data play, longer term? That's even worse, if so.

In short, yes. But being acquired is probably only seen as a salvage plan at this stage.

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