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$30-50/month is a wild price point for this. Who is going to pay that? It feels too expensive both for enterprise (existing remote desktop solutions run about h

$30-50/month is a wild price point for this. Who is going to pay that? It feels too expensive both for enterprise (existing remote desktop solutions run about half the cost) and for end-users. I worked on a similar solution to this and we had a price point of $5/month per user... EDIT: 16GB of RAM and 16vCPUs. What a weird balancing of resources. Chrome is typically memory bound, not CPU bound. This also explains why it would be so wildly expensive compared to anything else out there. EDIT2: A lot of the replies I'm getting seem to think my implication here is that no one would pay for this or it would be easier for people to build this themselves. I'm not saying that at all, I'm just critiquing the price point. There's huge market demand for browser isolation, I've worked on products in that field, I just haven't encountered any customers willing to pay $30-50/month for it.

arikr 5y ago
Not for many professionals it’s not. If you’re making good money, investing $1-2 dollars a day to be able to work more productively is incredible roi. I hope to see people normalize spending $ on software. A lot of software is way under priced, and if it was priced higher, we’d have more incentives for companies to come and make more great software.
- ordx 5y ago
  What kind of target audience can drop this much monthly, but can't afford a computer with 16GB of RAM? Genuinely curious.
  - andrewguenther 5y ago
    Exactly. Also, who needs those resources just for a browser? Why not make it a full VDI instead? With those resources it feels like a waste to limit it that way.
    - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
      Right, and that's something that's also on the market, e.g. https://shadow.tech/ https://shadow.tech/ edit Apparently that solution uses (or used) unencrypted connections, making it unsuitable for most uses. https://old.reddit.com/r/ShadowPC/comments/a6hi2c/anyone_use_shadow_for_work/ebwk9p8/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ShadowPC/comments/a6hi2c/anyone_use...
  - arikr 5y ago
    I have 16GB of ram and certain sites are still slow and chrome still lags
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    I can imagine a small niche for something like this. Big corps can end up with weird IT department restrictions and capex/opex inelasticity. There are a tragic number of professionals stuck with a cheap Dell thin-and-light laptop with a 1368x768 TN display and 6 GB RAM. They can absolutely afford a better computer, but they can't get IT/purchasing to give it to them. They're unincentivized to spend their own money on a nicer computer, and even if they did want to, they could never get it on the domain and approved with IT's spyware and antispam software. But they may have a small amount of opex, their direct manager could accommodate a monthly "I need this subscription to do my job". This results in stupidly expensive Todo-list collaboration subscriptions, and cloud computers that are more expensive than local computers, and IT-bypassed remote storage systems...it's not a rationally optimal state of affairs, more like a weird corner of the chaos of modern society.
    - heipei 5y ago
      Genuine question, but would the places that are that inflexible wrt to hardware upgrades have the flexibility to allow you to use a cloud service to perform your most sensitive work?
      - hkt 5y ago
        Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. (The UK's IRS) I worked there and they had these awful surface pros with hardly any memory. Their solution was to use AWS's hosted Desktop for Developers. It.. sort of worked OK. This, by the way, was not just for a few people: because of Brexit there are thousands of people all working on making the new systems for customs etc work. I suspect organisations that are undergoing digital transformation (as they are) will have this kind of setup. It was rife through the whole place: rubbish old IT stuff rubbing shoulders with modern SaaS.
        flukus 5y ago
        I hate this setup. You generally need to have anything audio/video related on the laptop anyway and these are the most CPU hungry apps. Working through remote sessions suck and are high latency even on good connections, it's really noticeable for certain things like alt-tabbing and intellisense and it works awfully for multi monitor setups. I suspect it's more so companies can pretend all their old rules about keeping data on site can remain. Still, it's better than going back to the office.
  - dimmke 5y ago
    This is my thing about it - I always hear people complaining about Chrome being a memory hog, but it never feels slow to me. I'm writing this with 15 tabs open and it's not even a worry. I only have 16gb in my laptop too.
    - jamestimmins 5y ago
      I suspect the target user has way more than 15 tabs open. I wouldn't be surprised if I often have > 100 tabs, as crazy as it sounds.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jamestimmins 5y ago
    I regularly run Docker + Slack + dozens of Brave tabs (still Chromium), and both individual tabs and my whole computer will slow down with some frequency, despite having 16GB of RAM.
- andiareso 5y ago
  Am I missing something? How does Mighty allow professionals access to internal websites and other internally hosted content. If this is priced for professionals, how is it even possible to allow workers to stream sensitive documents etc from a cloud service browser? Serious questions.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > If you’re making good money, investing $1-2 dollars a day to be able to work more productively is incredible roi. Sure, but investing $2/day pays for an M1 MacBook Air in under 2 years. That's why so many of us are struggling to understand this. It might make sense in the context of companies with weird IT department restrictions that won't let them buy new laptops but will let them spend $50/month on a service.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  This argument falls apart when you consider how often this is made nowadays. Yes, for one individual product spending 1-2$ per day isn't much. If you do this however for everything people advocate it nowadays, you're suddenly spending a thousand bucks plus per month solely on subscriptions. > it was priced higher, we’d have more incentives for companies to come and make more great software This is also a strange logic. The definition of innovation and the benefit of competition is to drive down prices for consumers, not up. Let's not turn software into some sort of Veblen good.
cblconfederate 5y ago
You can rent a xeon server w 32 gb ram with gigabit internet and SSD for $30/mo from hetzner. Or spend $600 and get an always-on home PC that you can vnc to with your hi speed connection On the other hand, if this catches on, then i can see people airbnb-ing their servers on the third hand, if this catches on , users will soon realize they can spend the $30 to buy the extra RAM they re missing
- ben174 5y ago
  If Elon catches wind of this we'll have robo-PC-taxi service soon.
- quadrature 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    you don't scare me! there are such comments about everything that has ever launched and the vast majority of them were right ;)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - hombre_fatal 5y ago
      Well, that's one of the points. It's easy and trivial to come up with the downsides of something. There are already a bunch of people trying to do that in every thread. Might as well exercise the less-used part of the brain where you try to imagine the positive aspects of something.
      - cblconfederate 5y ago
        I would care if i knew the buzz around these things is organic or genuine. Yet this thing popped simultaneously on my twitter , hn and elsewhere, clearly some marketing machine is pushing it. Overall though, technology that reduces the options of the user and gatekeeps is always net negative imho.
dpweb 5y ago
I totally would but it better be REALLY fast
blfr 5y ago
$30-50/month is a wild price point for this 16GB of RAM and 16vCPUs. What a weird balancing of resources. They are probably doing things somewhat inefficiently in the beginning, like renting whole, generic VMs for every customer. Both the price and the resource balance should get better when they catch a little scale.
suhail 5y ago
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.
- secondbreakfast 5y ago
  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 :)
  - throwinawaysoon 5y ago
    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
  - bin_bash 5y ago
    Salesforce doesn’t have serious competition, unlike Mighty
  - lmeyerov 5y ago
    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 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!
- 5y ago
the_arun 5y ago
Why cannot Google do what Mightyapp is doing for free?
- andrewguenther 5y ago
  They actually tried! There was a Chromium project called Blimp for a while which supported browser streaming, but it got shut down after less than a year in development. Had some major dev power behind it too, not sure what happened.
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    Project Stream & Stadia happened, iirc.
    - andrewguenther 5y ago
      Very different projects than what Blimp was. Blimp was integrated into Chromium's rendering pipeline itself to stream draw commands directly to the client browser.
      - throwaway3699 5y ago
        True, but I do believe there was a natural evolution. Stadia started as a Chrome project, for example.
      - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
        That's not going to help with watching YouTube videos though.
  - mdwelsh 5y ago
    I was head of the Blimp team at Google and could tell you exactly what happened, although it’s probably not something I can discuss too much publicly. Great project, great team, turned out to be very hard and involved making major changes to Chrome to do what we wanted. And unlike Mighty we were not willing to charge users a ton of money to use it. Fast, cheap, high quality: pick two :-)
Jommi 5y ago
For the "why would someone pay" question, I think it's quite simple. 1. We are more and more moving to a world of highly valuable workers. Improving their efficiency in a high salary country is easily worth it. Company should be willing to pay 0.4 - 1% of your salary to make you more efficient. 2. Longer liftetime of company computers. No need to upgrade to M1 yet. 3. Seems like they are building a full on WorkOS as well. That migth also just be worth it.
- heipei 5y ago
  So you have a highly valuable worker where you can afford to pay 1% of their salary for increased efficiency but somehow you can't afford the $1000 to upgrade their machine? Hmmm...
  - Jommi 5y ago
    Or you already upgraded the machine and require more efficiency :) Or the upgraded machine comes with other differences that worker doesn't want :) It doesn't need to be each of this reasons, and it doesnt need to be a combination, but im just pointing these out as possible ways to justify the pricing.
- nly 5y ago
  Many companies provide their software engineers with laptops that have 64GB of RAM as standard. The whole pricing thing is super interesting though, and I'm glad you're having success
  - lupire 5y ago
    Many don't, though, especially ones that use Max clients.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  (1) Sure, but installing more memory works as well and is typically possible without upgrading the CPU a la (2). I'm also not really sure what (3) is about--I'm a bit familiar with WorkOS, but I'm not familiar enough to understand how Mighty is competing.
timgriffin77 5y ago
Ah yes, because someone who has thought about this problem for 5 minutes is absolutely more knowledgable about the space than a team that has spent 2 years building it. Hats off to you for the top troll comment.
- andrewguenther 5y ago
  I actually worked on browser isolation products for seven years. No need to be rude. EDIT: Just because the attitude of this comment really grinds my gears: Here's my patent for network-based content rendering which was submitted back in 2017: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10878187B1 https://patents.google.com/patent/US10878187B1 Believe me, I've thought about this a little more than 5 minutes.
  - simfree 5y ago
    That is pretty messed up that the USPTO granted Amazon a patent for what Opera was doing decades ago.
    - andrewguenther 5y ago
      Opera Mini used a resource compression proxy. That's not what this patent is for.
- orf 5y ago
  The first troll comment I'm reading here is yours. Just because you stare at some toast for two years until you start to see an image of Jesus in it doesn't mean someone else can't point out that it's just a burn mark. 16GB of memory for 16vCPUs is a very weird balancing of resources in anyone's books. Either their definition of a "vCPU" is actually a far smaller CPU share in order to pump up the numbers or they are overselling CPU hard. And yes, 50$ a month is also a high price point for this.
- deleted 5y ago
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smnrchrds 5y ago
At this price point, wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a more powerful computer? Just buying more RAM would probably get the job done.
- thirdlamp 5y ago
  The servers that mighty running on will also be upgraded overtime, so you don't really need to update
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > you don't really need to update But you are updating. You're spending $360-600 a year on this. RAM isn't that expensive, even if you do feel like you need to upgrade again in another 2-3 years. I can buy a completely brand new, good computer every 3 years for that price. And it will be able to handle running 100 tabs. There are a lot of potential reasons why someone might benefit from a remote browser, but I don't think computer processing power is one of them. My phone can handle running over 100 tabs in Firefox. I don't know, is this an adblock thing? I currently have ~950 tabs open on my 6-year-old desktop computer, and my computer isn't crashing. I think it's currently using 8-9 gigs of RAM. Maybe my system is particularly optimized, or maybe without an adblocker websites are way heavier and multitasking is a big problem? I do run uMatrix and uBlock Origin, so maybe my experience isn't typical. But the point is, for $30-60 a month I could buy another 16 gigs of RAM.
    - madars 5y ago
      I am sure it is uBlock + uMatrix that's giving you the boost. I use both and whenever I open a regular website in Incognito mode (in case uMatrix ruleset adjustment would be too consuming for a one-off) you can feel the fans spinning up. Wish more people used these addons -- there is no reason why webpages should download megabytes of JavaScript to "improve my experience" :-)
  - fyrabanks 5y ago
    You're paying THEM to update their servers at a price point you could easily match or come in lower on YOUR workstation upgrades. I don't understand how people are trying to justify this cost.
whiddershins 5y ago
Netflix’s Creative Cloud clusters are more targeted towards my use case, but I get the gist and it might be really seriously valuable.
jpalomaki 5y ago
This kind of service lives and dies based on the experience customers initially get. It makes sense to put the price tag on a level where you can provide top-notch service, even if it means serving less customers at first. It's not a bad thing if people get the feeling your service provides great experience, but is too expensive. You can fix this later by dropping price or giving discounts.
swyx 5y ago
as a happy Superhuman user paying $30/month for slightly faster Gmail: yes. its absolutely worth it for tools you use daily to be as fast as humanly achievable.
Apofis 5y ago
I'm not onboard with this price-point either. If it's pointed at shitty chromebooks users, I get the price point even less. Nvidia GeForce NOW (Cloud Gaming Steaming) is $10 a month and gives you access to top of the line enterprise GPU/CPU/RAM hardware and nearly your entire Steam, Unreal, Ubi, etc libraries. I can play Cyberpunk 2077 with fully maxed out graphics settings with no perceptible latency. https://play.geforcenow.com https://play.geforcenow.com (There's a free tier, that gives you access to 1 hour a day of gameplay.)
blibble 5y ago
it's a lot easier to overcommit CPUs
antihero 5y ago
It's more expensive than GeForce NOW which lets you stream AAA games, and more expensive than Shadow PC which lets you stream a whole OS.
- deleted 5y ago
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- m1sta_ 5y ago
  Twitter's special move was a character limit. There are people who just want the browser and will ironically pay a premium to have that one thing done very well.
sriram_sun 5y ago
I have a 2013 Macbook Pro and I want to keep using it forever. Now if it (Mighty) helps me focus and save 1 hour of my time per month my work, I'll pay up the $30/mo. However, I'd like to pause my subscription whenever possible. I am a consultant. Time is money. Can it save me an hour per. month? How many hours will I spend customizing it? Will my existing plugins work? What layer of Chrome did they optimize? Security implications? I'll be looking for answers to these questions. The founder is someone with a level head and I trust them enough to not chase after "made up" problems. EDIT: I did wonder about offsetting some of my CPU load by renting a VM out on the cloud instead of paying the $30 though. Not sure of the cost there.
senojretep356 5y ago
This is a bit like Superhuman. Who will pay $30 a month for faster gmail? Turns out a lot of people and they love it. Sure a lot of people won't and will continue using free email services but those that do really value it and give it a high NPS. I see this being similar, people who spend a lot of time in Chrome and for who the improved speeds are highly valuable in both terms of opportunity cost will not think of $30 as 'too expensive'. The other thing is customer service, like Superhuman, with a $30 a month price tag you can actually give good customer service. Finally, at this price tag you only need about 275,000 customers and you have $100m ARR. I don't know how long the Mighty wait list is, I do know Superhumans was last reported as 275,000. Only time and the market will tell, but I'm really bullish on this company doing great things.
synaesthesisx 5y ago
Here’s a cheaper solution: just use Safari instead. Your battery will thank you too.
- frankfrank13 5y ago
  apple needs to double down on safari, it really lags behind Chrome right now, and likely won't ever be a dev's first choice until they adopt v8 or release the underlying engine. Chrome is the new IE, its the only browser I'm allowed to use on my work computer
eli 5y ago
The question is whether it generates $30-50 of value a month to users, not if it’s a good price per GB. For people who spend all day in a browser, which is a lot of people, I could see it.
fabrica 5y ago
I can't see it being a thing on the consumer end, so it has to be enterprise. The problem it'll face being marketed to consumers is that every one of the big JS application sites has already deployed a mobile app that takes care of the "works on light hardware" part. For the ad-laden, tracker-heavy news sites of the world, there are ad-blocker extensions and Brave. Independent professionals that have to use a heavy site will opt to upgrade their spec, almost certainly; computer financing has made it so that you can pay $30-50 a month to get a whole new system - why would you pay to get a worse experience? Now, the enterprise can afford to spend on this and it can even solve some major problems. But that's a "current enterprise" problem, and not where I see tomorrow's enterprise going. There will always be startups aiming to be savvier than this, cut out more fat and not get locked into this particular opex and security model. The basic premise relies on the Web keeping its dominant state and I suspect we're in the midst of a trend reversal against centralized systems. And...if the current enterprise doesn't provision correctly, it's likely they'll just continue to do so and leave their employees to suffer with 2Gb laptops, because it hasn't become mission critical yet. So, I really do suspect that while it might have a chance for a few years, it's in a race against time to get some market share and expand differentiating factors. In this respect it could have the success of a Dropbox, i.e. "get big, then run out of places to go".
- oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
  All they need is to get a few large companies on board, and then to convince Web developers that it's no longer necessary to think at all about front-end performance. The rest of us will be forced to follow suit when a critical mass of Web sites require beefier hardware than we can afford to buy ourselves, and faster connections than we can even get access to due to Comcast and Time Warner not giving a shit about speed.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
With that kind of money, you can almost lease nice laptop almost that comes with a browser. I've been looking at options for this recently. 50/month should get you something decent if you commit to that for 2-3 years. That's 1800 over 3 years. E.g. one of the fancy Aple M1 mac book pros would cost about 1300, I believe. The air is cheaper. The other thing is that browsers need GPUs as well. A lot of stuff is hardware accelerated in Browsers these days. Just a bunch of vcpus does not help that much. As it is, the target audience seems to be people with too much money and yet with a shitty laptop unable to run a browser properly. I'm sure these people exist but it does not sound like a great market opportunity. Also, from a security point of view, I don't think that a lot of Fortune 500 companies would ever agree tot this. However, that oddly might be the path to success for this company as well: play the security angle rather than the performance angle: lots of companies worry about their employees having their laptops and phones stolen. The less data is on these devices; the better. But it will need to be iron clad and more than "We won't look! We promise". That in itself basically just screams "but we could if we wanted to". But if you think about it, a lot of office workers access internal tools almost exclusively through browsers these days anyway and most of that stuff is cloud based anyway. It's just that the terms of use, SLAs, etc. give IT departments enough warm fuzzy feelings that they don't forbid this. Office 365 is a good example. Hosts a lot of very confidential information in a lot of companies. So not a strange thought to narrow the surface between the user and that to just a remotely running browser. Also there's the convenience angle. A lot of developers are running their development tools remotely. Github is pushing e.g. code spaces. VS code can mount things over ssh. It's becoming normal to do that. So why not do that for other things as well? Streaming games is another good example. I would not be surprised to see Google go there eventually.
- suhail 5y ago
  I am not sure if you read our website but a couple of comments: 1. We use GPUs and many vCPUs actually help with multi-processing since most browser tabs will peg a single CPU 2. A lot fortune 500 companies have adopted "browser isolation" products that do something similar but aren't focused around speed.
lupire 5y ago
> 16GB of RAM and 16vCPUs. What a weird balancing of resources. Chrome is typically memory bound, not CPU bound. A vcpu is about 0.25 of a real core, so it's just a little high. Browser can use multiple CPUs, but mostly for multimedia which you probably aren't using a cloud browser for.
lobocinza 5y ago
Cloud bandwagon effect.
crb002 5y ago
Imagine Apple partnering with telcos to do this off M2 racks then Google doing the same with Chrome split into a client and Linux container - $10/month for "Chrome Pro".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

arikr 5y ago

Not for many professionals it’s not. If you’re making good money, investing $1-2 dollars a day to be able to work more productively is incredible roi. I hope to see people normalize spending $ on software. A lot of software is way under priced, and if it was priced higher, we’d have more incentives for companies to come and make more great software.

ordx 5y ago
What kind of target audience can drop this much monthly, but can't afford a computer with 16GB of RAM? Genuinely curious.
- andrewguenther 5y ago
  Exactly. Also, who needs those resources just for a browser? Why not make it a full VDI instead? With those resources it feels like a waste to limit it that way.
  - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
    Right, and that's something that's also on the market, e.g. https://shadow.tech/ https://shadow.tech/ edit Apparently that solution uses (or used) unencrypted connections, making it unsuitable for most uses. https://old.reddit.com/r/ShadowPC/comments/a6hi2c/anyone_use_shadow_for_work/ebwk9p8/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ShadowPC/comments/a6hi2c/anyone_use...
- arikr 5y ago
  I have 16GB of ram and certain sites are still slow and chrome still lags
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  I can imagine a small niche for something like this. Big corps can end up with weird IT department restrictions and capex/opex inelasticity. There are a tragic number of professionals stuck with a cheap Dell thin-and-light laptop with a 1368x768 TN display and 6 GB RAM. They can absolutely afford a better computer, but they can't get IT/purchasing to give it to them. They're unincentivized to spend their own money on a nicer computer, and even if they did want to, they could never get it on the domain and approved with IT's spyware and antispam software. But they may have a small amount of opex, their direct manager could accommodate a monthly "I need this subscription to do my job". This results in stupidly expensive Todo-list collaboration subscriptions, and cloud computers that are more expensive than local computers, and IT-bypassed remote storage systems...it's not a rationally optimal state of affairs, more like a weird corner of the chaos of modern society.
  - heipei 5y ago
    Genuine question, but would the places that are that inflexible wrt to hardware upgrades have the flexibility to allow you to use a cloud service to perform your most sensitive work?
    - hkt 5y ago
      Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. (The UK's IRS) I worked there and they had these awful surface pros with hardly any memory. Their solution was to use AWS's hosted Desktop for Developers. It.. sort of worked OK. This, by the way, was not just for a few people: because of Brexit there are thousands of people all working on making the new systems for customs etc work. I suspect organisations that are undergoing digital transformation (as they are) will have this kind of setup. It was rife through the whole place: rubbish old IT stuff rubbing shoulders with modern SaaS.
      - flukus 5y ago
        I hate this setup. You generally need to have anything audio/video related on the laptop anyway and these are the most CPU hungry apps. Working through remote sessions suck and are high latency even on good connections, it's really noticeable for certain things like alt-tabbing and intellisense and it works awfully for multi monitor setups. I suspect it's more so companies can pretend all their old rules about keeping data on site can remain. Still, it's better than going back to the office.
- dimmke 5y ago
  This is my thing about it - I always hear people complaining about Chrome being a memory hog, but it never feels slow to me. I'm writing this with 15 tabs open and it's not even a worry. I only have 16gb in my laptop too.
  - jamestimmins 5y ago
    I suspect the target user has way more than 15 tabs open. I wouldn't be surprised if I often have > 100 tabs, as crazy as it sounds.
- deleted 5y ago
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- jamestimmins 5y ago
  I regularly run Docker + Slack + dozens of Brave tabs (still Chromium), and both individual tabs and my whole computer will slow down with some frequency, despite having 16GB of RAM.
andiareso 5y ago
Am I missing something? How does Mighty allow professionals access to internal websites and other internally hosted content. If this is priced for professionals, how is it even possible to allow workers to stream sensitive documents etc from a cloud service browser? Serious questions.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> If you’re making good money, investing $1-2 dollars a day to be able to work more productively is incredible roi. Sure, but investing $2/day pays for an M1 MacBook Air in under 2 years. That's why so many of us are struggling to understand this. It might make sense in the context of companies with weird IT department restrictions that won't let them buy new laptops but will let them spend $50/month on a service.
Barrin92 5y ago
This argument falls apart when you consider how often this is made nowadays. Yes, for one individual product spending 1-2$ per day isn't much. If you do this however for everything people advocate it nowadays, you're suddenly spending a thousand bucks plus per month solely on subscriptions. > it was priced higher, we’d have more incentives for companies to come and make more great software This is also a strange logic. The definition of innovation and the benefit of competition is to drive down prices for consumers, not up. Let's not turn software into some sort of Veblen good.

cblconfederate 5y ago

You can rent a xeon server w 32 gb ram with gigabit internet and SSD for $30/mo from hetzner. Or spend $600 and get an always-on home PC that you can vnc to with your hi speed connection On the other hand, if this catches on, then i can see people airbnb-ing their servers on the third hand, if this catches on , users will soon realize they can spend the $30 to buy the extra RAM they re missing

ben174 5y ago
If Elon catches wind of this we'll have robo-PC-taxi service soon.
quadrature 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  you don't scare me! there are such comments about everything that has ever launched and the vast majority of them were right ;)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hombre_fatal 5y ago
    Well, that's one of the points. It's easy and trivial to come up with the downsides of something. There are already a bunch of people trying to do that in every thread. Might as well exercise the less-used part of the brain where you try to imagine the positive aspects of something.
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      I would care if i knew the buzz around these things is organic or genuine. Yet this thing popped simultaneously on my twitter , hn and elsewhere, clearly some marketing machine is pushing it. Overall though, technology that reduces the options of the user and gatekeeps is always net negative imho.

dpweb 5y ago

I totally would but it better be REALLY fast

blfr 5y ago

$30-50/month is a wild price point for this 16GB of RAM and 16vCPUs. What a weird balancing of resources. They are probably doing things somewhat inefficiently in the beginning, like renting whole, generic VMs for every customer. Both the price and the resource balance should get better when they catch a little scale.

suhail 5y ago

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.

secondbreakfast 5y ago
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 :)
- throwinawaysoon 5y ago
  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
- bin_bash 5y ago
  Salesforce doesn’t have serious competition, unlike Mighty
- lmeyerov 5y ago
  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 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!
5y ago

the_arun 5y ago

Why cannot Google do what Mightyapp is doing for free?

andrewguenther 5y ago
They actually tried! There was a Chromium project called Blimp for a while which supported browser streaming, but it got shut down after less than a year in development. Had some major dev power behind it too, not sure what happened.
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  Project Stream & Stadia happened, iirc.
  - andrewguenther 5y ago
    Very different projects than what Blimp was. Blimp was integrated into Chromium's rendering pipeline itself to stream draw commands directly to the client browser.
    - throwaway3699 5y ago
      True, but I do believe there was a natural evolution. Stadia started as a Chrome project, for example.
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      That's not going to help with watching YouTube videos though.
- mdwelsh 5y ago
  I was head of the Blimp team at Google and could tell you exactly what happened, although it’s probably not something I can discuss too much publicly. Great project, great team, turned out to be very hard and involved making major changes to Chrome to do what we wanted. And unlike Mighty we were not willing to charge users a ton of money to use it. Fast, cheap, high quality: pick two :-)

Jommi 5y ago

For the "why would someone pay" question, I think it's quite simple. 1. We are more and more moving to a world of highly valuable workers. Improving their efficiency in a high salary country is easily worth it. Company should be willing to pay 0.4 - 1% of your salary to make you more efficient. 2. Longer liftetime of company computers. No need to upgrade to M1 yet. 3. Seems like they are building a full on WorkOS as well. That migth also just be worth it.

heipei 5y ago
So you have a highly valuable worker where you can afford to pay 1% of their salary for increased efficiency but somehow you can't afford the $1000 to upgrade their machine? Hmmm...
- Jommi 5y ago
  Or you already upgraded the machine and require more efficiency :) Or the upgraded machine comes with other differences that worker doesn't want :) It doesn't need to be each of this reasons, and it doesnt need to be a combination, but im just pointing these out as possible ways to justify the pricing.
nly 5y ago
Many companies provide their software engineers with laptops that have 64GB of RAM as standard. The whole pricing thing is super interesting though, and I'm glad you're having success
- lupire 5y ago
  Many don't, though, especially ones that use Max clients.
throwaway894345 5y ago
(1) Sure, but installing more memory works as well and is typically possible without upgrading the CPU a la (2). I'm also not really sure what (3) is about--I'm a bit familiar with WorkOS, but I'm not familiar enough to understand how Mighty is competing.

timgriffin77 5y ago

Ah yes, because someone who has thought about this problem for 5 minutes is absolutely more knowledgable about the space than a team that has spent 2 years building it. Hats off to you for the top troll comment.

andrewguenther 5y ago
I actually worked on browser isolation products for seven years. No need to be rude. EDIT: Just because the attitude of this comment really grinds my gears: Here's my patent for network-based content rendering which was submitted back in 2017: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10878187B1 https://patents.google.com/patent/US10878187B1 Believe me, I've thought about this a little more than 5 minutes.
- simfree 5y ago
  That is pretty messed up that the USPTO granted Amazon a patent for what Opera was doing decades ago.
  - andrewguenther 5y ago
    Opera Mini used a resource compression proxy. That's not what this patent is for.
orf 5y ago
The first troll comment I'm reading here is yours. Just because you stare at some toast for two years until you start to see an image of Jesus in it doesn't mean someone else can't point out that it's just a burn mark. 16GB of memory for 16vCPUs is a very weird balancing of resources in anyone's books. Either their definition of a "vCPU" is actually a far smaller CPU share in order to pump up the numbers or they are overselling CPU hard. And yes, 50$ a month is also a high price point for this.
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smnrchrds 5y ago

At this price point, wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a more powerful computer? Just buying more RAM would probably get the job done.

thirdlamp 5y ago
The servers that mighty running on will also be upgraded overtime, so you don't really need to update
- danShumway 5y ago
  > you don't really need to update But you are updating. You're spending $360-600 a year on this. RAM isn't that expensive, even if you do feel like you need to upgrade again in another 2-3 years. I can buy a completely brand new, good computer every 3 years for that price. And it will be able to handle running 100 tabs. There are a lot of potential reasons why someone might benefit from a remote browser, but I don't think computer processing power is one of them. My phone can handle running over 100 tabs in Firefox. I don't know, is this an adblock thing? I currently have ~950 tabs open on my 6-year-old desktop computer, and my computer isn't crashing. I think it's currently using 8-9 gigs of RAM. Maybe my system is particularly optimized, or maybe without an adblocker websites are way heavier and multitasking is a big problem? I do run uMatrix and uBlock Origin, so maybe my experience isn't typical. But the point is, for $30-60 a month I could buy another 16 gigs of RAM.
  - madars 5y ago
    I am sure it is uBlock + uMatrix that's giving you the boost. I use both and whenever I open a regular website in Incognito mode (in case uMatrix ruleset adjustment would be too consuming for a one-off) you can feel the fans spinning up. Wish more people used these addons -- there is no reason why webpages should download megabytes of JavaScript to "improve my experience" :-)
- fyrabanks 5y ago
  You're paying THEM to update their servers at a price point you could easily match or come in lower on YOUR workstation upgrades. I don't understand how people are trying to justify this cost.

whiddershins 5y ago

Netflix’s Creative Cloud clusters are more targeted towards my use case, but I get the gist and it might be really seriously valuable.

jpalomaki 5y ago

This kind of service lives and dies based on the experience customers initially get. It makes sense to put the price tag on a level where you can provide top-notch service, even if it means serving less customers at first. It's not a bad thing if people get the feeling your service provides great experience, but is too expensive. You can fix this later by dropping price or giving discounts.

swyx 5y ago

as a happy Superhuman user paying $30/month for slightly faster Gmail: yes. its absolutely worth it for tools you use daily to be as fast as humanly achievable.

Apofis 5y ago

I'm not onboard with this price-point either. If it's pointed at shitty chromebooks users, I get the price point even less. Nvidia GeForce NOW (Cloud Gaming Steaming) is $10 a month and gives you access to top of the line enterprise GPU/CPU/RAM hardware and nearly your entire Steam, Unreal, Ubi, etc libraries. I can play Cyberpunk 2077 with fully maxed out graphics settings with no perceptible latency. https://play.geforcenow.com https://play.geforcenow.com (There's a free tier, that gives you access to 1 hour a day of gameplay.)

blibble 5y ago

it's a lot easier to overcommit CPUs

antihero 5y ago

It's more expensive than GeForce NOW which lets you stream AAA games, and more expensive than Shadow PC which lets you stream a whole OS.

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m1sta_ 5y ago
Twitter's special move was a character limit. There are people who just want the browser and will ironically pay a premium to have that one thing done very well.

sriram_sun 5y ago

I have a 2013 Macbook Pro and I want to keep using it forever. Now if it (Mighty) helps me focus and save 1 hour of my time per month my work, I'll pay up the $30/mo. However, I'd like to pause my subscription whenever possible. I am a consultant. Time is money. Can it save me an hour per. month? How many hours will I spend customizing it? Will my existing plugins work? What layer of Chrome did they optimize? Security implications? I'll be looking for answers to these questions. The founder is someone with a level head and I trust them enough to not chase after "made up" problems. EDIT: I did wonder about offsetting some of my CPU load by renting a VM out on the cloud instead of paying the $30 though. Not sure of the cost there.

senojretep356 5y ago

This is a bit like Superhuman. Who will pay $30 a month for faster gmail? Turns out a lot of people and they love it. Sure a lot of people won't and will continue using free email services but those that do really value it and give it a high NPS. I see this being similar, people who spend a lot of time in Chrome and for who the improved speeds are highly valuable in both terms of opportunity cost will not think of $30 as 'too expensive'. The other thing is customer service, like Superhuman, with a $30 a month price tag you can actually give good customer service. Finally, at this price tag you only need about 275,000 customers and you have $100m ARR. I don't know how long the Mighty wait list is, I do know Superhumans was last reported as 275,000. Only time and the market will tell, but I'm really bullish on this company doing great things.

synaesthesisx 5y ago

Here’s a cheaper solution: just use Safari instead. Your battery will thank you too.

frankfrank13 5y ago
apple needs to double down on safari, it really lags behind Chrome right now, and likely won't ever be a dev's first choice until they adopt v8 or release the underlying engine. Chrome is the new IE, its the only browser I'm allowed to use on my work computer

eli 5y ago

The question is whether it generates $30-50 of value a month to users, not if it’s a good price per GB. For people who spend all day in a browser, which is a lot of people, I could see it.

fabrica 5y ago

I can't see it being a thing on the consumer end, so it has to be enterprise. The problem it'll face being marketed to consumers is that every one of the big JS application sites has already deployed a mobile app that takes care of the "works on light hardware" part. For the ad-laden, tracker-heavy news sites of the world, there are ad-blocker extensions and Brave. Independent professionals that have to use a heavy site will opt to upgrade their spec, almost certainly; computer financing has made it so that you can pay $30-50 a month to get a whole new system - why would you pay to get a worse experience? Now, the enterprise can afford to spend on this and it can even solve some major problems. But that's a "current enterprise" problem, and not where I see tomorrow's enterprise going. There will always be startups aiming to be savvier than this, cut out more fat and not get locked into this particular opex and security model. The basic premise relies on the Web keeping its dominant state and I suspect we're in the midst of a trend reversal against centralized systems. And...if the current enterprise doesn't provision correctly, it's likely they'll just continue to do so and leave their employees to suffer with 2Gb laptops, because it hasn't become mission critical yet. So, I really do suspect that while it might have a chance for a few years, it's in a race against time to get some market share and expand differentiating factors. In this respect it could have the success of a Dropbox, i.e. "get big, then run out of places to go".

oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
All they need is to get a few large companies on board, and then to convince Web developers that it's no longer necessary to think at all about front-end performance. The rest of us will be forced to follow suit when a critical mass of Web sites require beefier hardware than we can afford to buy ourselves, and faster connections than we can even get access to due to Comcast and Time Warner not giving a shit about speed.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

With that kind of money, you can almost lease nice laptop almost that comes with a browser. I've been looking at options for this recently. 50/month should get you something decent if you commit to that for 2-3 years. That's 1800 over 3 years. E.g. one of the fancy Aple M1 mac book pros would cost about 1300, I believe. The air is cheaper. The other thing is that browsers need GPUs as well. A lot of stuff is hardware accelerated in Browsers these days. Just a bunch of vcpus does not help that much. As it is, the target audience seems to be people with too much money and yet with a shitty laptop unable to run a browser properly. I'm sure these people exist but it does not sound like a great market opportunity. Also, from a security point of view, I don't think that a lot of Fortune 500 companies would ever agree tot this. However, that oddly might be the path to success for this company as well: play the security angle rather than the performance angle: lots of companies worry about their employees having their laptops and phones stolen. The less data is on these devices; the better. But it will need to be iron clad and more than "We won't look! We promise". That in itself basically just screams "but we could if we wanted to". But if you think about it, a lot of office workers access internal tools almost exclusively through browsers these days anyway and most of that stuff is cloud based anyway. It's just that the terms of use, SLAs, etc. give IT departments enough warm fuzzy feelings that they don't forbid this. Office 365 is a good example. Hosts a lot of very confidential information in a lot of companies. So not a strange thought to narrow the surface between the user and that to just a remotely running browser. Also there's the convenience angle. A lot of developers are running their development tools remotely. Github is pushing e.g. code spaces. VS code can mount things over ssh. It's becoming normal to do that. So why not do that for other things as well? Streaming games is another good example. I would not be surprised to see Google go there eventually.

suhail 5y ago
I am not sure if you read our website but a couple of comments: 1. We use GPUs and many vCPUs actually help with multi-processing since most browser tabs will peg a single CPU 2. A lot fortune 500 companies have adopted "browser isolation" products that do something similar but aren't focused around speed.

lupire 5y ago

> 16GB of RAM and 16vCPUs. What a weird balancing of resources. Chrome is typically memory bound, not CPU bound. A vcpu is about 0.25 of a real core, so it's just a little high. Browser can use multiple CPUs, but mostly for multimedia which you probably aren't using a cloud browser for.

lobocinza 5y ago

Cloud bandwagon effect.

crb002 5y ago

Imagine Apple partnering with telcos to do this off M2 racks then Google doing the same with Chrome split into a client and Linux container - $10/month for "Chrome Pro".

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