On GitHub, that instance type is $2.88/hour or $2,073 monthly per developer for a single instance.
(Granted, that's running 24/7 but still - wow, that's expensive for a single instance)
Companies typically buy laptops with an assumed 3 year lifespan; so, let's assume a high-end $3000 laptop, that would be ~$83/month. Of course, you need a computer to access Github Codespaces, so this isn't saving all of that money. Maybe companies can cut some costs by buying cheaper laptops?
Or if you want a more apples-to-apples; a Lenovo ThinkStation P620 runs ~$2800 for 32 threads and 64gb memory. DIY would also land somewhere around that $3K mark; a Threadripper 2950x (32 thread) is $1100; 64gb of memory is around $250.
This, of course, is the most expensive option they have; the more standard option would be 4/8; for which you would pay ~$85/mo (all the time, normal work hours), for the privilege of a machine that's far less powerful than any laptop any of our developers have. For god's sake, my M1 MacBook Air is an 8/16, with four of those cores far more powerful than any three year old Xeon Azure has running. And it was like $1400.
I understand maintaining dev machines isn't the easiest thing in the world. I have never once worked anywhere where it was such a problem that the company would justify tens of thousands of dollars in spend. Because it kind of is one-or-the-other; time invested in making Github Codespaces work for your company is time not invested in maintaining local dev environments. And Github's ideal end-state is companies totally rely on Codespaces, so the local dev environments languish.
Its not worth it.
The cost difference between laptop meant for remote development vs regular dev laptop is less than $1k. ($300 for CPU upgrade, $200 for RAM, $200 for SSD upgrade)?
If your dev costs you $100/h, you only have to save them +/- 5 hours of faffing around with branches/dependencies every month to make it worth it (assuming a 8 hour workday).
Big could, of course. But considering it takes new devs at my company ~3 business days to get up and running (and we're a React shop), it could be worthwhile.
Look, this is yet another product targeting naive VC funded startups. Milking the cows until they bleed.
Where we run into trouble is when we try to copy the shape of those big companies, and the kind of initiatives they fund, into startups, or mid-range companies. In quite a few ways, those top companies are better at development, but the base costs are only worthwhile if you have a money fountain of real revenue that grows far faster than your dev expenses. Trying to copy them with very different conditions is going to lead to tough problems, possibly company killing, and it's the kind of imitation we see all over the industry.
So yes, someone like Github is going to have eye popping expenses, because the alternatives to avoid those expenses just don't make sense to them. If you are not working in a multi billion dollar company, their practices can be interesting, but it makes as much sense to emulate them as it'd make for you to hire an entire Formula 1 pit crew to keep your commuter car in good shape.
I guess lucky for them to be owned by Microsoft now and so that's just a cost of doing business. I have a hard time believing they could have even considered an approach like this if they were still paying for hardware out of pocket.
Kudos to the team for figuring it out though.
I do wonder how many VM's they have running though at different points of the day and how many spares they have prepared.
A powerful laptop is a drop in the ocean compared to how much cloud VMs cost per developer.
Sure, you might not need to buy machines that are as beefy (although I bet you'll still need a decent machine to run all your chrome/electron windows) but enterprise maintenance on these machines is still a significant cost.
I definitely don't think one can look at this from the 'saving money' angle.