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Pico.sh – SSH powered services for developers

622 points by TheTaytay 5 days ago | 141 comments

unshavedyak 5 days ago

Alright, i had plans to use Github (or maybe something Cloudflare ish) but your $2/m has me seriously interested. I'm reviewing now.

I hate when i see fun side projects that cost the same as full subscriptions to other products. There's only a handful of $15/m services i "want" in my life.. it really raises the barrier to entry when i'm so aware and averse to subscription costs.

Yet $2/m? Instantly sold on that price. It's a fun price, it looks like a fun product, it lines up perfectly for me. It's silly that the price has me almost more interested than the product. Love it

Thanks for this, i plan to try it out!

unshavedyak 5 days ago

Bandwidth limitations has me chuckling though: https://pico.sh/faq#are-there-any-bandwidth-limitations

Any thoughts on how the review will happen when that barrier is reached?

wongarsu 5 days ago

Traffic isn't actually that expensive outside of big clouds. No idea where pico is hosted, but Hetzner gives you "unlimited" 1Gps connections with a dedicated server, or a 10G uplink charged at $1.20/TB (plus a fixed monthly fee for the uplink itself).

shishcat 5 days ago

I have good reasons to believe this is hosted on Oracle's free tier. Apart from the fact that pinging pico.sh points to an Oracle IP, the 10TB limit is consistent with Oracle Free Tier's limit.

qudat 5 days ago

You are correct, we are also multi-cloud: https://pico.sh/regions

wongarsu 5 days ago

Good call. Oracle does charge somewhat reasonable $8.50/TB after the first 10TB/month. Despite my dislike of Oracle it's not a terrible choice for this until you get some serious traffic.

nathants 5 days ago

hetzner is $1.5/TB for us and eu.

iambrandonm 5 days ago

Totally feel you on this and kudos to these guys, low pricing makes it so much easier to actually try something without second-guessing. I’m working on a similar philosophy with my own project, 99dev — simple tools for indie devs at just $1/month. Starting with lightweight analytics (like a mini Plausible), but more tools are on the way. No bloat, just useful stuff for folks like us who are building things and watching our budgets.

Really glad to see more projects like pico.sh embracing low cost, no frills, indie services. https://99.dev

ryao 5 days ago

You could use GitHub pages + cloudflare for free hosting. My neighbor uses that.

blatantly 5 days ago

$2 is fun for hobbies but hope you are not running in production for your customers with that sort of service level!

qudat 4 days ago

Thanks for the comment because I think many -- including myself -- resonate with this sentiment. Our pricing strategy was to be competitive with a user just provisioning their own VPS VM with a cloud provider. Our goal is to be competitive on price with a $5/mo VM.

Further, we are mostly targeting individual/small teams who want to rapidly prototype on the web. We provide enough convenience features (e.g. zero-install, multi-region, site analytics, tunnel connect/disconnect notifications, easy script automation) to entice users to keep their prototypes running in "prod" as long as possible before they feel the need to provision their own VPS.

We could go upstream and try to target larger teams/companies, but honestly, this is just fun for us to do on the side.

We don't make any guarantees about uptime at this point but we take it very seriously (we have alerting and respond quickly) and treat it like our day-jobs (I work at a paas and antonio is a platform engineer wizard).

unshavedyak 4 days ago

For static sites is there that much missing? Throw a good CDN in front of this and would it matter much who the host was?

blatantly 4 days ago

At $2/m SRE is powered by love only.

unshavedyak 3 days ago

Yea, but if it's cached in a CDN does it matter as much? We're talking static sites here, they scale incredibly easy and cheaply and something like Cloudflare makes this obscenely easy and robust.

Am i being too generous?

TheTaytay 5 days ago

I stumbled across this clever service when looking for a “pastebin” that handled rendering terminal output with ANSI codes. The irony is that they don’t actually allow that (just plain text can be piped to their pastes service), but I found their whole site and vibe delightful!

And the two authors, qudat, and antoniomima are active on HN, as their responsive comments here demonstrate. Just good work all around.

qudat 5 days ago

Co-Founder here, thanks for the interest in our micro-saas powered by SSH.

Happy to answer any questions!

LelouBil 5 days ago

Hey, I was just reading your docs, maybe prose.sh will be what I'll use to finally start a blog !

I noticed this mention here [0]:

    Because in our Go SSH server we re-implement rsync, many options are currently not supported. For example, --delete and --dry-run are not supported.
But on your front page it says :

    Upload your static site to us:
    rsync --delete -rv ./public/ pgs.sh:/mysite/
So do you support delete ? One of these pages is outdated or did I miss something ?

[0] https://pico.sh/file-uploads

antoniomika 5 days ago

Woops! Delete is supported, will update that as well

cfebs 5 days ago

Sorry if I didn't catch this on the site, but any new upcoming services you are excited about?

A ssh or TUI frontend for some git/forge host like: https://forgejo.org/ would be pretty cool!

WinstonSmith84 4 days ago

So I understand I can redirect my custom domain to Pico Pages, Pico Prose, etc. Can I however do the other way around? Can I create somehow a CNAME on my Pico.sh account (such as username-myapp.pgs.sh points to abc.xyz.com)? In essence, I'd like to be able to get a certificate and set a secure https connection to e.g. my Load Balancer my-alb-12345.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com or similar.

antoniomika 4 days ago

Yep! tuns would be the service you want since it can support forwarding arbitrary backends: https://pico.sh/tuns#custom-domains

WinstonSmith84 3 days ago

Thanks. Let me know if I misunderstood, but it seems that this is redirecting my custom domain customdomain.example.com to tuns.sh

customdomain.example.com. 300 IN CNAME tuns.sh.

_sish.customdomain.example.com 300 IN TXT "SHA256:mVPw"

What I want to do is:

1- to create a custom domain ON tuns.sh (or another Pico service)

2- redirect this custom domain to another DNS (such as a Load Balancer, an API Gateway, etc.)

Something like: {username}-{proj}.tuns.sh. 300 IN CNAME myalb-123abc.amazonaws.com.

memset 5 days ago

I remember seeing this a couple of years ago on HN!

Would you be willing to share how it’s doing on the business side? Hints on how you’ve grown users or how many folks are willing to subscribe?

I’d love to build a service (in a different domain) that operates as simply as this.

qudat 4 days ago

> Would you be willing to share how it’s doing on the business side? Hints on how you’ve grown users or how many folks are willing to subscribe?

Yes, absolutely. Here's our year-end-review where we talk numbers: https://blog.pico.sh/status-011

Ultimately, what keeps us going is we want these services to exist for our own side-project development and it's an extra boost of motivation when others use our services.

All of our marketing is through HN/lobsters/reddit since that's our target demo.

jwr 5 days ago

Love the idea, but I couldn't find a "pricing" page and wanted to abandon reading immediately (I have no time for unsustainable services). Then I learned from the discussion that the pricing is $2/m, which, two things: 1) I still can't find that price on the web site, and 2) it seems unsustainable to me, so I'm still worried.

I run a B2B SaaS. Support costs is what eats you alive: in case of a complex B2B app anything below $40/month is unsustainable. This is of course better for simpler apps/services, but even there you have to be super careful.

qudat 4 days ago

Thank you for the feedback and we agree so we have changed the header nav link from "pico+" to "pricing".

In terms of the costs to run a saas, we are actively monitoring hardware utilization and resource allocation. Antonio and I have a lot of experience building and running saas (and paas) products so we feel confident we can manage whatever usage comes our way. We have also been strategic in terms of the services we provide in an effort to keep service support manageable.

jimbosis 5 days ago

I had the same frustration as you with finding the pricing information. With some serendipitous clicking, I managed to find it!

https://pico.sh/plus

It does also mention there is a $0 "Starter" tier.

(I found that link on this page:

https://pico.sh/pgs )

EDIT: Mention the Starter tier.

cookiemonsieur 5 days ago

> I run a B2B SaaS. Support costs is what eats you alive: in case of a complex B2B app anything below $40/month is unsustainable

I agree to an extent. But it largely depends on the complexity of your offering. If all you do is expose flat data through an API, you can maybe get away with an API Gateway x Lambda x DynamoDB combo, which would cost virtually nothing as the free tier is very generous.

Just my 2c.

jwr 4 days ago

Well, but that API Gateway x Lambda x DynamoDB combo will not answer support E-mails, will it?

Especially with B2B, it's easy to underestimate the support load for non-technical issues.

cookiemonsieur 4 days ago

> Well, but that API Gateway x Lambda x DynamoDB combo will not answer support E-mails, will it?

How does that factor into the $40/month price point ?

lionkor 5 days ago

$40/month per user, just for support? So for 1000 users, you need to make $40,000 to be sustainable, i.e. like 10 employees?

conductr 4 days ago

I'm thinking not much support is needed for user's that are willing and able to do all these tasks over SSH. They've pre-filtered for low support load

Back in early 2000s I ran a shared webhosting business, most customer's were savvy at the time and it was kind of a "you're on your own, let me know if the infra is acting up" type arrangement. I ran it with about 2000 customers for a year or so solo and only got about 2 support emails a day. Back then, 24-72 hour response was acceptable so I never needed to be a 24/7 resource.

jwr 4 days ago

If you think you can run a business with 10 high-skilled employees on $40,000 of revenue per month, boy, have I got news for you :-)

Similarly, if you think 1000 B2B SaaS subscriptions is an easy-to-achieve number, I'd wager a bet you haven't run a B2B SaaS business.

Roughly, the calculation is: at $40/month, a single subscription brings in $480/year. That means you can safely afford to spend roughly one hour of support on a subscription PER YEAR. If you spend more than 2h, you are definitely in the red. And you will get support requests, of all kinds: the ones you expect, and then all the stuff about lost passwords, inability to log in, network problems, lost invoices, requests to change the billing period, requests for invoices from last year for a customer that has since canceled and been deleted, data export/import, etc.

People who haven't run a business routinely underestimate the costs of running a business and imagine that these numbers mean that business owners are buying yachts and private jets. People who have run a business realize that it's much more difficult to make ends meet than it seems.

blatantly 5 days ago

Yeah I think this why "Book a call" level customers are really subsidising it. Say $10/m/u and you get 200 seats. You pay $2000/m but the bugs you hit are likely uniform so you loaf support like maybe 20 individual users. 20 individual users only bring in 10%. So you need the whales to keep it going.