10 ms·

PikaPods – Instant Open Source App Hosting

146 points by memorable 5y ago

sixhobbits 4y ago
I am not sure after reading the landing page if the platform itself is open source or if I am only allowed to host open source apps on it?
- tmikaeld 4y ago
  It’s a hosted service, not open source. The “pods” that run are open source
Brajeshwar 4y ago
Wholesome. Brilliant for lazy people like us. Start and tinker things around with this and either host it ourselves when we like or just continue using this. Thanks. Got my first pod running.
avnigo 4y ago
This looks interesting, but I don't see where I can find info on bandwidth limits or pricing.
- asaddhamani 4y ago
  It's at the bottom of the page. A pod with 1GB of RAM, 1 CPU core and 10GB of storage costs $2.65 per month. Bandwidth is not mentioned but I don't think it should be a problem with most of apps except for like blogs.
  - m3nu 4y ago
    No bandwidth limit or other charges. Just pay for allocated CPUs, memory and storage. Or stop the pod if it's not in use and pay for storage only ($1 minimum/month)
m3nu 4y ago
Founder here. Nice surprise to see this posted. Any questions, drop them here.
- goodburb 4y ago
  Any detailed privacy information? e.g storage encryption and access, system credentials etc. Why do some apps require billing information for trial?
  - m3nu 4y ago
    There is a boiler plate privacy page, but not with those technical details yet. First, storage isn’t encrypted and I can’t think of threat scenarios that require it, since we only use bare metal servers and control the drives. Wouldn’t add much benefit at the cost of higher CPU usage. For your account, you can enable TOTP 2FA from Account > Password/2FA. For our production servers, any admin access needs a hardware Yubikey.
    - eptcyka 4y ago
      If you control the drives, what will you do when old drives are cycled out? Will you just dump them in a bin for a letter agency to come and harvest my cat photos? IMO, FDE is easy enough to do, even if the users never get to do it themselves. It sort of protects the users from leaking their data in the event that a company goes out of business or someone breaks in to steal hardware.
      - m3nu 4y ago
        Usually overwrite the data a few times before decommissioning the server. I’ll do some testing for the next server to see how much overhead FDE would add.
- tealpod 4y ago
  No questions, just want to say Thank you. I see a great need for such service, planning to use some soon. Never heard about Pikapods before. Maybe there will be good demand for simple db like SQLite. Just a suggesion. Goodluck
quickthrower2 4y ago
Absolutely brilliant idea (ok it is an idea I have had myself, I am glad someone has done it) One thing that is not clear is the estimated costs - is that per app, or do you charge for the server and I can run multiple apps? I think $10 a month for something to power 50 or so apps (maybe I don’t use them all the time, if I do I expect things to get slow or you allow say 2 concurrent apps) would be great. I think this sort of thing will encourage people to use foss instead of the big walled gardens. Maybe this is the real web3? My idea is a bit different: most web apps probably just need something like a firestore DB (Parse I guess would do?) so you charge for that and then apps are just a JS bundle format. Like android you have a store but also allow direct uploads at the users own risk.
- m3nu 4y ago
  It’s per pod/app you run and depends on the resources you allocate. Price for minimum required resources is given for each app and starts at $1/month. Yeah, the goal is to make running FOSS as easy as Google Photos, but with more privacy and community-maintained code. Also hoping to channel some funds back to authors, but that’s more complex than expected. Just getting started with it.
  - indigodaddy 4y ago
    I think you should consider OP’s suggestion. Unlimited apps for some X flat rate. I believe this would bring in more users and potentially attract an audience who for instance was considering Cloudron but didn’t want the hassle of even managing/buying the VPS to install it on..
    - m3nu 4y ago
      I was considering this, but in a survey most respondents preferred a prepaid model to avoid surprise charges. The flatrate model does that too, though. Maybe worth trying in the future. Like Spotify for open source apps.
      - nicoburns 4y ago
simplehuman 4y ago
How does backups work? And what about updates? Or is this more like a 'try' / testing app hosting?
- m3nu 4y ago
  Backups are for the whole server at the moment and include mounted volumes and databases. Hoping to add per-pod snapshots a bit later. Helps that we already run a backup service. More on this planned feature here: https://feedback.pikapods.com/posts/14/offer-backup-option https://feedback.pikapods.com/posts/14/offer-backup-option Updates arrive a few days after they are released and if you keep the ‘automatic updated’ setting enabled. We do some rudimentary QA before deploying updates. It’s definitely for long-term hosting. Many pods have been running for months (we had a public beta since around January)
zokier 4y ago
Sounds a lot like sandcats (/sandstorm), albeit slightly less ambitious?
- m3nu 4y ago
  Sandstorm uses VM templates (Vagrant)[1], so pretty heavy and harder to update. I use Docker images, as provided by the upstream project. So you get the same experience as running it yourself, as well as quick updates. 1: https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/vagrant-spk/packaging-tutorial/ https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/vagrant-spk/packaging-tu...
  - troyjfarrell 4y ago
    Sandstorm uses Vagrant as part of the app packaging (for developers) process. It is _not_ used in everyday use of Sandstorm. Instead, "Sandstorm implements fine-grained containers"[1], not VMs. 1: https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-practices/ https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-practices...
    - m3nu 4y ago
      I see. So it’s like Docker, but their own implementation? Can’t wrap my head around it right now.
      - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
        Sandstorm has a pretty unique sandboxing model, which makes it drastically more secure than Docker in practice, but the tradeoffs in terms of packaging differences can be significant. One of the biggest things is that Sandstorm prefers to sandbox individual documents versus applications, which mitigates a huge variety of security flaws in apps. In most cases vulnerabilities in apps on Sandstorm are not exploitable when run on Sandstorm. It also manages most authentication and authorization roles for apps in an integrated way, which requires more integration work than just spinning up a Docker container. Feel free to hit me up if you want to know more, though it would be a lot of work to make Sandstorm work for your business model at this point. It's cool seeing others in the "make open source web apps user-friendly to run" space though.
ozcap 4y ago
It's really nice just to have a browse through the apps, actually. I've learned about some cool projects which I never knew existed!
- m3nu 4y ago
  That's what I think every time when I find a new project! There are a few directories, but none perfect. I'd like to see one that's user-updatable (via Github), sort- and filterable and shows the current health of a project (last update, contributors, ..). Closest I found is this: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
whouweling 4y ago
Very interesting concept and clear messaging on the website. Eager to test this for personal use. Big fan of BorgBase (the other product by the same company), I have been using them for quite some time for different projects.
kall 4y ago
Looks great. I would love to see some development tooling (if it's license allows), that I'm currently considering self hosting: Posthog, Sentry and Jitsu (aka EventNative). If Sentry setup is too insane maybe GlitchTip. I don't know if you run Clickhouse (needed for PostHog) yet, but I bet it will be used by a bunch of self hosted apps in the future and would be worth it. A very attractive option would be some kind of "Try on PikaPods" button, if you can somehow muster a very limited free tier, that these projects can put on their READMEs. A few have that with heroku and it makes them way more approachable. The pricing is very attractive compared to running these things e.g. on RDS+Fargate (~25x). Most people would probably run on Digital Ocean or Hetzner Cloud which is closer.
- m3nu 4y ago
  Still adding apps every week. Just suggest them here: https://feedback.pikapods.com/ https://feedback.pikapods.com/ Currently the limitations are: a) they should run on a single https port; b) come with some authentication and c) publish a Docker image of sort. There is already a "Run on PikaPods" button for our FOSS partners. Hoping to add it to more projects, so people can quickly start using an app.
harryvederci 4y ago
Looks great! 2 bits of feedback: - I'd like to know what kind of payment methods are available before signing up. - I'd LOVE it if this supported a prepaid payment option, where the service just stops if you run out of credit. (With an email alert, of course.)
- m3nu 4y ago
  Major credit cards via Stripe. Later PayPal probably. Yes, it's prepaid and your pod will stop after a few notifications. You can optionally enable automatic top-ups to avoid this. Both possible.
  - harryvederci 4y ago
    Awesome, thanks. If you're going to tell me it's also possible to remove a credit card after topping up the credit, I'll consider using this!
    - m3nu 4y ago
      It won't let you remove the last card because adding a card also unlocks some more "dangerous" apps that allow running custom code. And gives higher limits. Alternatively add a disposable one-time card. Many fintech apps provide those. Still, as vendor, I'd avoid putting a random charge on your card and then pay the chargeback fee. Ouch.
phh 4y ago
This looks pretty cool, thanks for doing that. I hope you'll manage to extend revenue share scheme. I would appreciate a bit more info about that revenue share scheme (like is photoprism getting 1c/user/month and it's just ""floss-washing"", or is it more? or maybe without showing an actual value, showing photoprims's developer opinion on whether they think the revenue share is fair would be nice) Even though this clearly target FLOSS-friendly users, which are already aware of stuff, they don't necessarily know all the floss services. So my recommendation would be to make an additional, more opinionated pod page (but I've never made a product in my life, so my advice is probably not worth much): - Show ""competing"" proprietary services in front of the pods, for people to maybe better understand what it is about - Make a subset list of ""recommended"" services, photoprism/photoview are redundant, developer/sysadmin stuff should probably not be listed, pick just one RSS aggregator (I personally use TinyTinyRSS which has a great Android appif I can add my own grain of salt) Thanks for the product and I wish you good luck
- m3nu 4y ago
  I won't share the precise % for each project, but the FAQ at the bottom of the page gives a hint. More than 1ct. Every project is encouraged to link to PikaPods if they think it's fair enough. Or if they want it as hosting option for their users. Hoping to expand FOSS financing over time. The revenue share won't be enough, I think. So I want an optional sponsorship option to directly support the project. And maybe get a direct line to developers with this. Still early days for this. I do know that people are willing to pay for the FOSS they use when it's convenient and when they already pay for something. Our other service, https://www.borgbase.com/ https://www.borgbase.com/ has shown this and we collect significant amounts there to support upstream development. Also keep in mind that many projects aren't ready to receive payments. Either the authorship is unclear (forked many times), they can't/won't issue invoices, just don't want payment categorically.
  - irq-1 4y ago
    If you look for foundations that service projects, like https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/ https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/ it could be easier to connect.
specialist 4y ago
Would a Plex pikapod make sense? I'd worry about bandwidth costs. I ask because a buddy was saying he wanted his own Plex instance, but doesn't have the inclination or time to figure out the hardware. Another suggestion might be Minecraft. My nephews have casually said they'd like their own server.
- ekzy 4y ago
  This app seems to target open source projects but Plex and Minecraft aren't open source
  - anderspitman 4y ago
    It supports FileRun which isn't open source, so Plex may be an option.
mxuribe 4y ago
I heard of this service recently from somewhere else too. Sounds really great; pricing is quite fair. This is the kind of service we need nowadays - where some software i can self-host, and others i can pay someone (like pikapods) to manage for me (at least at some lower/base level anyway). Good luck!
minroot 4y ago
Well, I am little confused. Is this thing open source too?
nazavo 4y ago
Congrats Manu! Great launch <3
skrtskrt 4y ago
This is awesome I’m for sure going to end up in this pipeline: Try apps on PikaPods as an easy way to test what I want to self-host -> damn this is easy, not gonna bother moving, I’ll just stay in PikaPods
Sinidir 4y ago
How can you offer these prices? a 2GB ram 1 cpu app costs $2.87 approxmately a month. Thats a way lower than any vps provider yet you offer a managed solution which should add to the cost.
- apitman 4y ago
  I assume they're overprovisioning and banking on the assumption that everyone won't need to access their data at the same time.

146 points by memorable 5y ago

I am not sure after reading the landing page if the platform itself is open source or if I am only allowed to host open source apps on it?

tmikaeld 4y ago
It’s a hosted service, not open source. The “pods” that run are open source

Brajeshwar 4y ago

Wholesome. Brilliant for lazy people like us. Start and tinker things around with this and either host it ourselves when we like or just continue using this. Thanks. Got my first pod running.

avnigo 4y ago

This looks interesting, but I don't see where I can find info on bandwidth limits or pricing.

asaddhamani 4y ago
It's at the bottom of the page. A pod with 1GB of RAM, 1 CPU core and 10GB of storage costs $2.65 per month. Bandwidth is not mentioned but I don't think it should be a problem with most of apps except for like blogs.
- m3nu 4y ago
  No bandwidth limit or other charges. Just pay for allocated CPUs, memory and storage. Or stop the pod if it's not in use and pay for storage only ($1 minimum/month)

m3nu 4y ago

Founder here. Nice surprise to see this posted. Any questions, drop them here.

goodburb 4y ago
Any detailed privacy information? e.g storage encryption and access, system credentials etc. Why do some apps require billing information for trial?
- m3nu 4y ago
  There is a boiler plate privacy page, but not with those technical details yet. First, storage isn’t encrypted and I can’t think of threat scenarios that require it, since we only use bare metal servers and control the drives. Wouldn’t add much benefit at the cost of higher CPU usage. For your account, you can enable TOTP 2FA from Account > Password/2FA. For our production servers, any admin access needs a hardware Yubikey.
  - eptcyka 4y ago
    If you control the drives, what will you do when old drives are cycled out? Will you just dump them in a bin for a letter agency to come and harvest my cat photos? IMO, FDE is easy enough to do, even if the users never get to do it themselves. It sort of protects the users from leaking their data in the event that a company goes out of business or someone breaks in to steal hardware.
    - m3nu 4y ago
      Usually overwrite the data a few times before decommissioning the server. I’ll do some testing for the next server to see how much overhead FDE would add.
tealpod 4y ago
No questions, just want to say Thank you. I see a great need for such service, planning to use some soon. Never heard about Pikapods before. Maybe there will be good demand for simple db like SQLite. Just a suggesion. Goodluck

quickthrower2 4y ago

Absolutely brilliant idea (ok it is an idea I have had myself, I am glad someone has done it) One thing that is not clear is the estimated costs - is that per app, or do you charge for the server and I can run multiple apps? I think $10 a month for something to power 50 or so apps (maybe I don’t use them all the time, if I do I expect things to get slow or you allow say 2 concurrent apps) would be great. I think this sort of thing will encourage people to use foss instead of the big walled gardens. Maybe this is the real web3? My idea is a bit different: most web apps probably just need something like a firestore DB (Parse I guess would do?) so you charge for that and then apps are just a JS bundle format. Like android you have a store but also allow direct uploads at the users own risk.

m3nu 4y ago
It’s per pod/app you run and depends on the resources you allocate. Price for minimum required resources is given for each app and starts at $1/month. Yeah, the goal is to make running FOSS as easy as Google Photos, but with more privacy and community-maintained code. Also hoping to channel some funds back to authors, but that’s more complex than expected. Just getting started with it.
- indigodaddy 4y ago
  I think you should consider OP’s suggestion. Unlimited apps for some X flat rate. I believe this would bring in more users and potentially attract an audience who for instance was considering Cloudron but didn’t want the hassle of even managing/buying the VPS to install it on..
  - m3nu 4y ago
    I was considering this, but in a survey most respondents preferred a prepaid model to avoid surprise charges. The flatrate model does that too, though. Maybe worth trying in the future. Like Spotify for open source apps.
    - nicoburns 4y ago

simplehuman 4y ago

How does backups work? And what about updates? Or is this more like a 'try' / testing app hosting?

m3nu 4y ago
Backups are for the whole server at the moment and include mounted volumes and databases. Hoping to add per-pod snapshots a bit later. Helps that we already run a backup service. More on this planned feature here: https://feedback.pikapods.com/posts/14/offer-backup-option https://feedback.pikapods.com/posts/14/offer-backup-option Updates arrive a few days after they are released and if you keep the ‘automatic updated’ setting enabled. We do some rudimentary QA before deploying updates. It’s definitely for long-term hosting. Many pods have been running for months (we had a public beta since around January)

zokier 4y ago

Sounds a lot like sandcats (/sandstorm), albeit slightly less ambitious?

m3nu 4y ago
Sandstorm uses VM templates (Vagrant)[1], so pretty heavy and harder to update. I use Docker images, as provided by the upstream project. So you get the same experience as running it yourself, as well as quick updates. 1: https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/vagrant-spk/packaging-tutorial/ https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/vagrant-spk/packaging-tu...
- troyjfarrell 4y ago
  Sandstorm uses Vagrant as part of the app packaging (for developers) process. It is _not_ used in everyday use of Sandstorm. Instead, "Sandstorm implements fine-grained containers"[1], not VMs. 1: https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-practices/ https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-practices...
  - m3nu 4y ago
    I see. So it’s like Docker, but their own implementation? Can’t wrap my head around it right now.
    - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      Sandstorm has a pretty unique sandboxing model, which makes it drastically more secure than Docker in practice, but the tradeoffs in terms of packaging differences can be significant. One of the biggest things is that Sandstorm prefers to sandbox individual documents versus applications, which mitigates a huge variety of security flaws in apps. In most cases vulnerabilities in apps on Sandstorm are not exploitable when run on Sandstorm. It also manages most authentication and authorization roles for apps in an integrated way, which requires more integration work than just spinning up a Docker container. Feel free to hit me up if you want to know more, though it would be a lot of work to make Sandstorm work for your business model at this point. It's cool seeing others in the "make open source web apps user-friendly to run" space though.

ozcap 4y ago

It's really nice just to have a browse through the apps, actually. I've learned about some cool projects which I never knew existed!

m3nu 4y ago
That's what I think every time when I find a new project! There are a few directories, but none perfect. I'd like to see one that's user-updatable (via Github), sort- and filterable and shows the current health of a project (last update, contributors, ..). Closest I found is this: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

whouweling 4y ago

Very interesting concept and clear messaging on the website. Eager to test this for personal use. Big fan of BorgBase (the other product by the same company), I have been using them for quite some time for different projects.

kall 4y ago

Looks great. I would love to see some development tooling (if it's license allows), that I'm currently considering self hosting: Posthog, Sentry and Jitsu (aka EventNative). If Sentry setup is too insane maybe GlitchTip. I don't know if you run Clickhouse (needed for PostHog) yet, but I bet it will be used by a bunch of self hosted apps in the future and would be worth it. A very attractive option would be some kind of "Try on PikaPods" button, if you can somehow muster a very limited free tier, that these projects can put on their READMEs. A few have that with heroku and it makes them way more approachable. The pricing is very attractive compared to running these things e.g. on RDS+Fargate (~25x). Most people would probably run on Digital Ocean or Hetzner Cloud which is closer.

m3nu 4y ago
Still adding apps every week. Just suggest them here: https://feedback.pikapods.com/ https://feedback.pikapods.com/ Currently the limitations are: a) they should run on a single https port; b) come with some authentication and c) publish a Docker image of sort. There is already a "Run on PikaPods" button for our FOSS partners. Hoping to add it to more projects, so people can quickly start using an app.

harryvederci 4y ago

Looks great! 2 bits of feedback: - I'd like to know what kind of payment methods are available before signing up. - I'd LOVE it if this supported a prepaid payment option, where the service just stops if you run out of credit. (With an email alert, of course.)

m3nu 4y ago
Major credit cards via Stripe. Later PayPal probably. Yes, it's prepaid and your pod will stop after a few notifications. You can optionally enable automatic top-ups to avoid this. Both possible.
- harryvederci 4y ago
  Awesome, thanks. If you're going to tell me it's also possible to remove a credit card after topping up the credit, I'll consider using this!
  - m3nu 4y ago
    It won't let you remove the last card because adding a card also unlocks some more "dangerous" apps that allow running custom code. And gives higher limits. Alternatively add a disposable one-time card. Many fintech apps provide those. Still, as vendor, I'd avoid putting a random charge on your card and then pay the chargeback fee. Ouch.

phh 4y ago

This looks pretty cool, thanks for doing that. I hope you'll manage to extend revenue share scheme. I would appreciate a bit more info about that revenue share scheme (like is photoprism getting 1c/user/month and it's just ""floss-washing"", or is it more? or maybe without showing an actual value, showing photoprims's developer opinion on whether they think the revenue share is fair would be nice) Even though this clearly target FLOSS-friendly users, which are already aware of stuff, they don't necessarily know all the floss services. So my recommendation would be to make an additional, more opinionated pod page (but I've never made a product in my life, so my advice is probably not worth much): - Show ""competing"" proprietary services in front of the pods, for people to maybe better understand what it is about - Make a subset list of ""recommended"" services, photoprism/photoview are redundant, developer/sysadmin stuff should probably not be listed, pick just one RSS aggregator (I personally use TinyTinyRSS which has a great Android appif I can add my own grain of salt) Thanks for the product and I wish you good luck

m3nu 4y ago
I won't share the precise % for each project, but the FAQ at the bottom of the page gives a hint. More than 1ct. Every project is encouraged to link to PikaPods if they think it's fair enough. Or if they want it as hosting option for their users. Hoping to expand FOSS financing over time. The revenue share won't be enough, I think. So I want an optional sponsorship option to directly support the project. And maybe get a direct line to developers with this. Still early days for this. I do know that people are willing to pay for the FOSS they use when it's convenient and when they already pay for something. Our other service, https://www.borgbase.com/ https://www.borgbase.com/ has shown this and we collect significant amounts there to support upstream development. Also keep in mind that many projects aren't ready to receive payments. Either the authorship is unclear (forked many times), they can't/won't issue invoices, just don't want payment categorically.
- irq-1 4y ago
  If you look for foundations that service projects, like https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/ https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/ it could be easier to connect.

specialist 4y ago

Would a Plex pikapod make sense? I'd worry about bandwidth costs. I ask because a buddy was saying he wanted his own Plex instance, but doesn't have the inclination or time to figure out the hardware. Another suggestion might be Minecraft. My nephews have casually said they'd like their own server.

ekzy 4y ago
This app seems to target open source projects but Plex and Minecraft aren't open source
- anderspitman 4y ago
  It supports FileRun which isn't open source, so Plex may be an option.

mxuribe 4y ago

I heard of this service recently from somewhere else too. Sounds really great; pricing is quite fair. This is the kind of service we need nowadays - where some software i can self-host, and others i can pay someone (like pikapods) to manage for me (at least at some lower/base level anyway). Good luck!

minroot 4y ago

Well, I am little confused. Is this thing open source too?

nazavo 4y ago

Congrats Manu! Great launch <3

skrtskrt 4y ago

This is awesome I’m for sure going to end up in this pipeline: Try apps on PikaPods as an easy way to test what I want to self-host -> damn this is easy, not gonna bother moving, I’ll just stay in PikaPods

Sinidir 4y ago

How can you offer these prices? a 2GB ram 1 cpu app costs $2.87 approxmately a month. Thats a way lower than any vps provider yet you offer a managed solution which should add to the cost.

apitman 4y ago
I assume they're overprovisioning and banking on the assumption that everyone won't need to access their data at the same time.