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Wow, you can type! Seriously, you don’t have to worry, the project is GPL’ed, so the community can take care of it when you’re not around anymore You can buil

• graderjs 5y ago
  Heh, thanks but it's not really about how much you can type. It's about how clearly and concisely you can say it I think... and I can definitely improve that. Actually the above was mostly voice typing that I then punctuated and corrected...so, anyway I noticed you switched to sentence case for this comment but you're normally in lower case, no need to be so formal :) I checked out your work on the web and you have a bunch of different personalities across your sites from a design / approach / content / voice point of view. Really diverse! I'm gonna be here forever, and on this project too, also the copyright is with my corporation, so you're only wasting your own time if you care about that or waiting for that... what I meant was--and I know I spent a lot of words and I guess I didn't make it clear--I hope people can use it right now without having to pay. But honestly I think the easiest way to do that is just for them to write it themselves, or just rip me off in secret, haha, they can "try" I'm sure. Seriously, tho I really would like to think I can just open it up to the community to use in a full free and open-source way, and gather a bunch of contributions and so on, without worrying I'm compromising the business side of it. Like I said above, the licenses are basically individually negotiated...because I'm an amateur I suppose...so for managed where I run it for them in the cloud it ranges from ~ 1500 to over 10K a month with my main cost being bandwidth. And on the hosted side, from ~3K a month to yearly licenses above 100K. The self-hosted ones are mostly perpetual for the version, re-upped to the latest version on the next payment, with maintenance and support contracts either included (existing for as long as license fees are paid) or separate. One of the most challenging things is contract negotiation. I discovered startups with VCs can be extremely frightened of IP clauses where they don't own everything absolutely ostensibly because their legal advisors see it as a risk to future raises. I'm sort of glad I'm bootstrapped and don't have to worry about VC!
  • ushakov 5y ago
    haha, glad you noticed and thanks for the compliments! i think this could become an open-source BrowserStack and Cloudflare Browser Isolation alternative generally, i’d trust a product more if it has an open source version and business-wise it makes easier to market to the developers, because they can try the product at home with no risk of getting a huge cloud provider bill but as you pointed out, not any org can self-host and that gives you a opportunity to offer a subscription-based service the technical difficulty here is in figuring out how to run at scale right now, as i understand you are hosting each instance manually, which is fine for bigger clients, but makes the service for smaller developers like myself unaffordable you could solve this by packaging the software in a Docker container and then use a orchestrator like Kubernetes to supply a copy to each client, automatically you can then monitor the usage and issue a bill with payment provider like Stripe generally, i’d recommend having a limited free tier, but if not possible a free trial for paying customers, you could charge per second spent in the browser window, instead of seats the reasoning for it, is some customers would cause more traffic than others and traffic is not inexpensive, therefor you should make a pricing model, which is linear with traffic hope this helps if you need further support, you can email me at mish at ushakov.co thanks
    • graderjs 5y ago
      Good ideas, and I agree with you about the market possibilities, and trust advantage of open-source, but the "manual deploy" is not actually how it works regarding paid deployments. The open-source version is just the browser software, enough for a single person to run a single instance, but the pro "closed source" version includes a bunch of extra control software for running as many instances as will fit on a machine, in a scalable, secure and resource-safe way, as well as souped-up features like co-browsing, better viewport streaming, and built-in secure document viewing. The open-source version actually comes with a docker image [1], but for the paid deployments I haven't seen the need for k8s. That might be because I don't understand k8s, but I just haven't seen the advantage over the way I'm currently doing it. And no-one has asked for k8s, either. But I think what you were trying to tell me was a good way to set up a SaaS version of this. And I admit I've struggled with that in the past. I think infrastructure has been a part of this failure, but even when I've had workable SaaS offerings, I think my marketing, pricing, design and the "trust factor" -- of doing your browsing in a 3rd-party in a new category (RBI vs, say, a VPN), and also of doing so with a tiny company -- were the big things. as to: > you can then monitor the usage and issue a bill with payment provider like Stripe > generally, i’d recommend having a limited free tier, but if not possible a free trial > for paying customers, you could charge per second spent in the browser window, instead of seats > the reasoning for it, is some customers would cause more traffic than others and traffic is not inexpensive, therefor you should make a pricing model, which is linear with traffic I really like your very solid sounding ideas for a SaaS setup tho. Thank you very much! [1]: https://hub.docker.com/r/dosyago/browsergapce https://hub.docker.com/r/dosyago/browsergapce