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Comment by Phurist | Hacker News Reader

Hmm.. you mind talking a bit more about it? You are just consulting them or getting your hands dirty as well?

About my business? Sure! It's at https://kubesail.com and we sell our hardware at https://pibox.io (the software works with almost anything that can run Linux tho!) :)

Our best feature is that the website will detect if you're on the same network as your machine and if so, offer "local" links instead of remotely proxied ones. That way non-technical users dont need anything fancy or to be aware of how NAT traversal works. On top of that, the "local" urls still get valid HTTPS certs for free, so non-technical users dont get any scary browser warnings.

We started out as a way to make self-hosting easier for corporations, and were doing consulting work, but the users who joined our community were mostly home-hosters, so we leaned into that! Jellyfin is now our most popular app.

The order page says "pre-order your pibox", but later says in-stock, and next-day shipping.

Very tempting looking product!

> 5-bay and desktop HDD compatible models are under development and will be coming soon.

The box does look pretty. Any plans for dual/multiple ethernet versions? At a quick glance the Pi compute module doesn't have any so you must have added the lone one yourselves?

And of course the geek in me would like to know the network chips and how they're connected to the compute module (although I guess usb is the only choice).

Given the market that you're after, why sell it as a SaaS? The people that want new subscription services, and the people that want to self-host feels like an empty set. Why not do the more traditional model of selling version 1 of the software for $x, and then when version 2 comes out, sell that for $y, and people with version 1 can pay $z to upgrade, where z < y.

The math could work out to be the same, but the psychology of marketing is everything. If I, as a hard-core-self-hoster, pay $60 for a version 1 of software that I can use forever, and version 2 comes out a year later, and I pay $60 for that; I'm much happier to do that, compared to having to pay $5/month for yet another subscription service, even though that's exactly the same amount of money. I already have so many subscription services! I don't want to pay for another one!

That’s effectively the tactic with the hardware - however - home hosting does need a SaaS imo! Between remote access (proxying ala cloudflare tunnels), backups, VPN, there are nontrivial ongoing services that need to be in place for happy home hosting.

That said - you’re not wrong at all and that’s why our service is totally optional and our free tier is quite generous.

The saas for sure made more sense when our target customers were companies.

The UX for a non-technical user to setup a port forwards is a total non starter, but self-hosted remote access and VPN are well covered by Tailscale + Tailscale Funnel these days. Backups for data is an actual service that people pay (and could get paid) for.

If you could provide similar functionality / workloads as the old MS Small Business Server isn't there a MSP / reseller market opportunity? Self hosting for businesses that are < 25 users. They still tend to be serviced by small MSP. They've gone cloud because that's where their vendors went. Many hate it.

You'd need

* Directory/Authenticaion

* Email

* Shared Folders

* Wiki / Web something

If there were options for adding IM, PBX, CRM it could be a compelling offering for resellers.

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