7 ms·
Val Town Pro - $10/month for more compute, storage, private vals
- Hexigonz 3y agoThis is really neat. I don't have much trouble deploying a Netlify function, but I like the idea of being able to schedule your cloud functions like Chron jobs. I might just use this for a future project.
- izolate 3y agoCool product and great execution! I've had the idea to build something like this for a while, but I'd rather use this.
- stevekrouse 3y agoThanks! Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions :)
- chadmckenna 3y agoThis is rad! Its so simple to use and I love the idea of making things composable and building off everyone else's code, I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the different ways to use this. Keep up the good work!
- wilg 3y agoLooks good, Steve!!
- stevekrouse 3y agoThanks Wil!!
- giantrobot 3y ago[flagged]
- hstan4 3y ago> Vals are small JavaScript or TypeScript snippets of code, written in the browser and run in our servers. Took two seconds by going to the home page.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoWhile you describe the technical approach, I think OP was asking "what is it? What does it do? Why would I care?" I can't really figure out the "Why would I care?" part from their website. I've been hearing them pop up a bunch. Just don't understand what they do.
- semi-extrinsic 3y agoTheir homepage, if you scroll a bit down, has a fairly good explanation: """ What is Val Town? Val Town is a social website to write and run code. Vals are small JavaScript or TypeScript snippets of code, written in the browser and run in our servers. Create scheduled functions, email yourself, and persist small pieces of data — all from the browser. """
- giantrobot 3y agoSo Val town is basically AWS Lambda. That still doesn't give me a good explanation of a "val". I'm guessing they don't want to use an AWS trademark but when I loaded the page I got a nice big table of prices and no useful definition of a "val".
- guraf 3y agoIt always surprises me when a tech company doesn't use the proper MB GB. It's one thing if they just don't care (screw the pedants, whatever) or don't know (which is scary but whatever), but valueing looks/typeface more than technical details in their technical offering is just bizarre.
- vore 3y agoYou understand it, I understand it, everyone understands it: it's just a purely aesthetic choice.
- pianoben 3y ago> You understand it, I understand it That may be, but... > it's just a purely aesthetic choice. SI metric prefixes[0] are case-sensitive; "mb" is not the same as "Mb". Not that computing has ever been rigorous on this point, but the point stands. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefixes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefi...
- ethbr0 3y ago>> Like the numbers they combine with, SI units and unit symbols are never shown in italics. That's so absurdly specific. I love it!
- benatkin 3y agoYou can get around that by using text-transform, then you can have the correct one in the DOM and the pretty one on your screen! Is that not what you meant? :D
- stevekrouse 3y agoApologies! I've been in a lowercase mood recently
- benatkin 3y agogo mebibyte or go home :)
- steinbring 3y agoCan someone define "val"? I don't think that I've seen that, before.
- stevekrouse 3y agoGreat question! A val is a small snippet of JavaScript/TypeScript that runs on our servers. You can also schedule them. We're trying to make a new kind of web primitive, like a Tweet or a Github repo, or more pointedly, like a Github Gist, but one that runs.
- meepmorp 3y agoI feel compelled to tell you that your website explains your product and what I might use it for incredibly well. It's a surprisingly rate trait in a service/product marketing site.
- stevekrouse 3y agoWow, thanks so much!
- unshavedyak 3y agoAny word on other language support? I kind of imagine a local hosted version quite similar to this being quite useful, and while this isn't locally run it's also quite cheap, so i wouldn't mind using it instead of local. With that said, i'd still want to "use my own languages". My specific interest being Rust.
- stevekrouse 3y agoOur strategy is to go extremely deep into one language/ecosystem (JS/TS) and be able to provide extremely good tooling around it. The downside is that there won't be a Rust version any time soon, if ever. I would make a plug for TypeScript though. It's a pretty fantastic language and while it's not Rust, I learned in my last startup that it's not that much slower than Rust, that much of the time: https://zaplib.com/docs/blog_post_mortem.html https://zaplib.com/docs/blog_post_mortem.html
- iudqnolq 3y agoI think the unit of runs/minute is wrong. Shouldn't it be a bare quantity, not a number of milliseconds?
- stevekrouse 3y agoGreat catch, thanks! Pushing a fix now...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- poyu 3y agoSomething similar I’ve been using is RunKit. It’s easy to quickly test something out and forget about. Will keep Val in mind though!
- ushakov 3y agoReminds me of Auth0 webtasks (R.I.P), which was a stellar product
- ushakov 3y agoWhat runtime do the vals run on? Deno? What are the limitations?
- stevekrouse 3y agoYes, it's Deno. What other limitations are you curious about besides the ones listed on the pricing page?
- samsquire 3y agoHi, I love this idea of interdependent scripts that everyone can build powerful things on top of. If only more companies were automatable such as groceries, Amazon shopping, pizza/food delivery, automatic webhosting (upload an tgz file and host a static site)
- warkdarrior 3y agoMany of the static webhosting sites can pull from GitHub. That seems pretty automatable.
- ericpauley 3y agoI'm having a hard time understanding the pricing model. As far as I can tell the pro plan gets you (max) 432,000 CPU seconds a month. Let's assume this is about equivalent to a 1GB lambda instance. That amount of CPU time and requests costs around $8/mo, and if you use less you pay less. I guess Val lets you run low-CPU tasks in the background for waiting on web requests, etc., but you can also do this with low-memory lambda instances. With lambda you also know that Amazon will stand behind the pricing structure, and the service won't disappear/10x pricing in a few years when it's time to juice the stats. It is nice to see competition in this space, but the pitch would be improved by offering a clearer value prop over existing offerings like Lambda.
- stevekrouse 3y agoSuch great feedback! Thank you! Val Town Pro is priced around "developer productivity" more than low-level compute costs. Ideally you start as a free user and find the platform so useful that when you bump against the limitations, you're happy to pay $10/month for more resources.
- mthoms 3y agoI'll have to agree with you here. There's no way you can compete with AWS on price per compute cycle. Just compete on the experience and simplicity. That's what's compelling about this.
- clemensnk 3y agoLooks really compelling, Steve! Fingers crossed for your success with it. Looking forward to play around with Val Town when time permits.
- stevekrouse 3y agoThanks!!
- latchkey 3y agoI feel like this is begging for an open source version that just runs as Github Actions.
- paddw 3y agoI think it would be cool if you eventually provided an app to facilitate people who want an easy way to get notifications on mobile devices. There are services which will already do this, but would be nice to have one bundled with the paid plan which wasn't liable to go away.
- simonw 3y agoI've started using NetNewsWire for this recently - it can poll RSS/Atom feeds and show notifications. It's not real-time though. For real-time notifications I've had good results from using either Slack or Discord with bots publishing to channels via webhooks.
- stevekrouse 3y agoGreat idea! Right now we recommend https://ntfy.sh/ https://ntfy.sh/ but you're right, we probably should do it bundled into the service
- Alifatisk 3y agoThere is also web notifications api!
- olah_1 3y agoYou used to be able to do something very similar with Perl, right? A bunch of independent scripts that were basically web endpoints? I forget the name of those little scripts... edit: CGI ?
- awestroke 3y agoNot very similar at all
- paulgb 3y agoAs a val.town user and former cgi-bin user, I'd say it's a bit similar in terms of how I use it. If webhooks were a thing in the cgi-bin days and I needed a one-off script to run every time a webhook fired, I would have put a script in cgi-bin. Now I'd create a val.
- Solvency 3y ago...how is it not similar? A perl script sits on a always-on server, ready to execute. You call it. It executes.
- rgrieselhuber 3y agoThis looks really useful. Simple pitch and lots of potential applications. Say hi to Dan!
- olah_1 3y agoI bet Nostr[1] integration in scripts will unlock tons of value for this. A totally open messaging and posting protocol that is maximally simple. [1]: https://github.com/nbd-wtf/nostr-tools https://github.com/nbd-wtf/nostr-tools
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- simonw 3y agoI was disappointed (though not really surprised) to find that the Deno on val.town is slightly locked down, to the point that it can't run Pyodide. I was hoping to get a Python script running there via Deno + WebAssembly + Pyodide, mainly because it would have been an entertaining hack! I tried to get a version of this running there: https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/pyodide-sandbox https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/pyodide-sandbox
- bko 3y agoI love the product. Very creative simple and useful. From about page you said you raise 1.5mm in pre seed funding. congratulations. Your about says you're not hiring, so what are you planning on doing with the money? That struck me as an astronomical amount esp for a pre seed
- stevekrouse 3y agoThanks! We're a team of four and that's about as big as you can get on 1.5m on full-time rates these days :shrug:
- bko 3y agoThanks for answering. I guess you guys are paying yourselves competitively. I thought most startups pay maybe 150k + equity with maybe a one year runway. Which would mean you would be able to support a team of 10. https://kruzeconsulting.com/do-founders-of-startups-that-have-raised-millions-give-themselves-paychecks-if-so-how-much-money-do-they-pay-themselves/ https://kruzeconsulting.com/do-founders-of-startups-that-hav...
- killingtime74 3y agoMaybe not everyone wants to cut it so fine? Makes sense to be conservative in this kind of climate. Never know how long until you can raise again
- dsr_ 3y agoPresumably: - the cost of an employee is not just their salary, but health insurance, taxes, a computer setup - it costs something to run the service So they may well be paying 4 people 150K each, and they have a year of runway.
- epiccoleman 3y agoRight, but presumably with some insurance and other benefits, total yearly run cost per employee are a bit higher.
- lucgagan 3y agoCould I use this to host Playwright test examples on my blog? I would like to make all of these code examples interactive https://ray.run/blog/tips-for-writing-efficient-playwright-test-scripts https://ray.run/blog/tips-for-writing-efficient-playwright-t... This requires running Chrome on the VM though Does this work with Val?
- stevekrouse 3y agoI would love to help you with that, but you're right Val Town can't run Chrome... Is there a hosted-playwright api service we could use?
- Hansenq 3y agoCongrats Steve and Andre! Product has come a long way since I got a demo 9 months ago, and definitely see the applications and applicability of the product now :) Looking forwards to what you guys are able to continue building in the future--and will likely be using Valtown for scripts of my own!
- stevekrouse 3y agoThanks!!
- lazzlazzlazz 3y agoWhat does it mean for a Val to be private? Private to whose eyes? And how do you verify that a private Val was executed properly?