5 ms·

> Then yeah there was no point paying $20-$30 a month for a remote browser instance. Sorry what? There are people that even considered this?

paulgb 4y ago
I’ve talked to a couple of very loyal Mighty users. If you think about the number of hours a knowledge worker spends in the browser every month, it works out to a pretty small price per hour. It’s similar to people in jobs that require them to live out of their inbox paying (a comparable amount) for Superhuman.
- aniforprez 4y ago
  I'm really REALLY not sure how it makes sense to pay that much for a remote browser unless there's something I'm missing which I have to think is the case. What was the actual hook here? Surely a remote browser cannot have been worth it for 240-360 dollars a year? Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? How are people suffering from slow browsers that much?
  - upbeat_general 4y ago
    Hence why M1 killed them. Some people do all their work in browsers.
    - disiplus 4y ago
      but you still need a somewhat ok laptop to use it. Screen battery and keyboard are still things that a 250$ laptop would be shit.
  - csande17 4y ago
    There's a reasonably sized market segment of people who, themselves, work at startups with dubious value propositions. They try to prop up the whole ecosystem by spending a lot of money on each other. (Source: worked at a late-stage startup, spent weeks integrating APIs that did nothing but were owned by a friend of the CEO.) There's another segment of people who can be sold snake oil. They aren't actually very sensitive to UI responsiveness, so they won't notice the extra latency added by the streaming service, but they will believe claims that it is "faster" than what they're currently using in some nebulous way. (These are the same kind of people who rewrite their app in React because they believe React makes apps faster.)
  - lkbm 4y ago
    > Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? Yes, probably, but I would note that a cheap M1 Mac is 4x the annual cost you cited for the browser, and if the browser is 95% of what you use a laptop for, getting the same perf boost for 25% the cost sounds like a good value prop. Granted, a laptop should last more than a year, but presumably it starts to show it's age in under four, whereas the remote browser can improve over time.
    - piva00 4y ago
      I had Macbooks that lasted 5 years (2010-2015) pretty well, my current MBA M1 is almost 2 years old and I don't see myself needing to swap it for another 2-3 at least. My girlfriend still uses her MBA from 2014. I don't really see how I could justify paying 20-25% of the price of my laptop per year, that I use for much more than just browsing, to have a faster browsing experience. And I'm a power user (SWE, etc.) compared to the mainstream consumer, the market for this product seems to be extremely niche/small.
    - Stention314 4y ago
      Then start to add all aspects: security, network delay, service downtime. I think baas is bullshit for security reasons alone.
      - paulryanrogers 4y ago
        Ironically BAAS is sold for security reasons too. As in isolation. You'd do very sensitive stuff with the remote browser, or vice versa, for isolation from other activity.
  - drcongo 4y ago
    There's a lot of people gaslit into thinking browsers are a janky slow mess because they've been using Chrome for so long.
- morelisp 4y ago
  This is an argument for a more broadly-accessible interface to e.g. Selenium, not for "the same browser, but somewhere else."
- jmathai 4y ago
  If people applied that logic of “my time is worth more” across everything in their lives - they would be beyond broke.
ohgodplsno 4y ago
Not only that, but there are clowns that seriously called it the future of computing (suhail included). Reselling Hetzner instances and locking access to Chromium, brought to you by the finest VC backed startups.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

paulgb 4y ago

I’ve talked to a couple of very loyal Mighty users. If you think about the number of hours a knowledge worker spends in the browser every month, it works out to a pretty small price per hour. It’s similar to people in jobs that require them to live out of their inbox paying (a comparable amount) for Superhuman.

aniforprez 4y ago
I'm really REALLY not sure how it makes sense to pay that much for a remote browser unless there's something I'm missing which I have to think is the case. What was the actual hook here? Surely a remote browser cannot have been worth it for 240-360 dollars a year? Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? How are people suffering from slow browsers that much?
- upbeat_general 4y ago
  Hence why M1 killed them. Some people do all their work in browsers.
  - disiplus 4y ago
    but you still need a somewhat ok laptop to use it. Screen battery and keyboard are still things that a 250$ laptop would be shit.
- csande17 4y ago
  There's a reasonably sized market segment of people who, themselves, work at startups with dubious value propositions. They try to prop up the whole ecosystem by spending a lot of money on each other. (Source: worked at a late-stage startup, spent weeks integrating APIs that did nothing but were owned by a friend of the CEO.) There's another segment of people who can be sold snake oil. They aren't actually very sensitive to UI responsiveness, so they won't notice the extra latency added by the streaming service, but they will believe claims that it is "faster" than what they're currently using in some nebulous way. (These are the same kind of people who rewrite their app in React because they believe React makes apps faster.)
- lkbm 4y ago
  > Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? Yes, probably, but I would note that a cheap M1 Mac is 4x the annual cost you cited for the browser, and if the browser is 95% of what you use a laptop for, getting the same perf boost for 25% the cost sounds like a good value prop. Granted, a laptop should last more than a year, but presumably it starts to show it's age in under four, whereas the remote browser can improve over time.
  - piva00 4y ago
    I had Macbooks that lasted 5 years (2010-2015) pretty well, my current MBA M1 is almost 2 years old and I don't see myself needing to swap it for another 2-3 at least. My girlfriend still uses her MBA from 2014. I don't really see how I could justify paying 20-25% of the price of my laptop per year, that I use for much more than just browsing, to have a faster browsing experience. And I'm a power user (SWE, etc.) compared to the mainstream consumer, the market for this product seems to be extremely niche/small.
  - Stention314 4y ago
    Then start to add all aspects: security, network delay, service downtime. I think baas is bullshit for security reasons alone.
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      Ironically BAAS is sold for security reasons too. As in isolation. You'd do very sensitive stuff with the remote browser, or vice versa, for isolation from other activity.
- drcongo 4y ago
  There's a lot of people gaslit into thinking browsers are a janky slow mess because they've been using Chrome for so long.
morelisp 4y ago
This is an argument for a more broadly-accessible interface to e.g. Selenium, not for "the same browser, but somewhere else."
jmathai 4y ago
If people applied that logic of “my time is worth more” across everything in their lives - they would be beyond broke.

ohgodplsno 4y ago

Not only that, but there are clowns that seriously called it the future of computing (suhail included). Reselling Hetzner instances and locking access to Chromium, brought to you by the finest VC backed startups.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]