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haha, glad you noticed and thanks for the compliments! i think this could become an open-source BrowserStack and Cloudflare Browser Isolation alternative gene

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

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