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Pico.sh – SSH powered services for developers
- this_is_madness 2y agoWithout being open source this is basically just a walled garden version of sr.ht.
- antoniomika 2y agoWe're actually fully open source and all development occurs in the open! Here's the repo https://github.com/picosh/pico https://github.com/picosh/pico and you can find us on Libera IRC
- mrbluecoat 2y ago> Upload your static site to us How do you prevent abuse, like illegal material?
- jkingsman 2y agoThis is the challenge. This is tiny and delightful, but most hosting systems are monsters from a compliance perspective not because of a hunger for bureaucracy but that content moderation is SUPER hard.
- shishcat 2y agoyou can easily find entire VMs for 2€/month on sites like LES
- kupopuffs 2y agopeople assuming that LE are going after smalltime hosting
- diggan 2y ago> content moderation is SUPER hard That's a bit over-exaggerated, it certainly isn't fun, nor very interesting, but it's doable, even for smaller organizations. Today is even easier as classification/labeling ML models are pretty good even without any fine-tuning/training on your own dataset.
- Helithumper 2y agoCould be useful to have a tool similar to https://git.0x0.st/mia/0x0#moderation-ui https://git.0x0.st/mia/0x0#moderation-ui
- aitchnyu 2y agoTangential, how heavy is a NSFW classifier for a VPS? This link leads to a HuggingFace model with Telegram id of author offering premium model.
- diggan 2y ago> how heavy is a NSFW classifier for a VPS? Not heavy at all, they're really tiny in the grand scale of things and can easily run on CPU only unless you're wanna classify 100s of items per second.
- Andoryuuta 2y agoI'm not sure why it would be different from any other hosting provider. They do clarify what they consider abuse / forbidden content, and their operational policies though: [1]: https://pico.sh/abuse https://pico.sh/abuse [2]: https://pico.sh/ops#code-of-content-publication https://pico.sh/ops#code-of-content-publication
- ashishb 2y agoAnd that's why no one can offer this sustainably for $2/month. There is a cost of policing for illegal stuff as well as outright terrible stuff that requires fair bit of effort.
- wongarsu 2y agoGranted, the market for shared hosting has settled closer to $6, but OVH, Hetzner and Netcup all still offer shared hosting for $2/month, with a free domain on top. And all three are in this market for ages now. They limit you to static pages, PHP and a MySQL database, but you can do plenty of illegal stuff with that.
- rendx 2y agoYou can even get full 'root' on a virtual machine for that price, and plenty of webhosting options. https://lowendbox.com/blog/2-usd-vps-cheap-vps-under-2-month/ https://lowendbox.com/blog/2-usd-vps-cheap-vps-under-2-month... For many years now I've been hosting my IRC bouncer on a $13/yr VPS at netcup and it has been more stable than some of my other VPSes.
- qudat 2y agoGood question. Right now we run some ML models to check for illegal content and then respond immediately with the ban hammer. We also monitor content published on our platform with some admin tools we built.
- amelius 2y agoMy company blocks ssh. Is there a way to tunnel this through HTTP?
- prmoustache 2y agoUse that from home or a mobile phone connection? You probably aren't supposed to update your personal website and stuff when you are working for your company anyway.
- chasil 2y agoI have heard that SSH could be tunneled over DNS UDP packets. This looks like a decent article, will read later. https://medium.com/@rogergalo/learn-how-easy-is-to-bypass-firewalls-using-dns-tunneling-and-also-how-to-block-it-3ed652f4a000 https://medium.com/@rogergalo/learn-how-easy-is-to-bypass-fi...
- palata 2y agoNot sure if it has to go that far. Probably it's just blocking port 22.
- mbreese 2y agoAgreed. You can host both SSH and HTTPS on port 443. I know this used to be possible with HAProxy, but now Nginx can do it as well. This way you are hosting normal HTTPS traffic when a browser is used and SSH otherwise. Now, if your company is actually blocking the SSH protocol, you’ll have to do something like tunneling SSH through SSL, which is also possible… but not as easier IIRC.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- palata 2y agoI agree. Something like what GitHub offers? https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/troubleshooting-ssh/using-ssh-over-the-https-port https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/troubleshooting-ss...
- unshavedyak 2y agoAlright, i had plans to use Github (or maybe something Cloudflare ish) but your $2/m has me seriously interested. I'm reviewing now. I hate when i see fun side projects that cost the same as full subscriptions to other products. There's only a handful of $15/m services i "want" in my life.. it really raises the barrier to entry when i'm so aware and averse to subscription costs. Yet $2/m? Instantly sold on that price. It's a fun price, it looks like a fun product, it lines up perfectly for me. It's silly that the price has me almost more interested than the product. Love it Thanks for this, i plan to try it out!
- unshavedyak 2y agoBandwidth limitations has me chuckling though: https://pico.sh/faq#are-there-any-bandwidth-limitations https://pico.sh/faq#are-there-any-bandwidth-limitations Any thoughts on how the review will happen when that barrier is reached?
- wongarsu 2y agoTraffic isn't actually that expensive outside of big clouds. No idea where pico is hosted, but Hetzner gives you "unlimited" 1Gps connections with a dedicated server, or a 10G uplink charged at $1.20/TB (plus a fixed monthly fee for the uplink itself).
- shishcat 2y agoI have good reasons to believe this is hosted on Oracle's free tier. Apart from the fact that pinging pico.sh points to an Oracle IP, the 10TB limit is consistent with Oracle Free Tier's limit.
- wongarsu 2y agoGood call. Oracle does charge somewhat reasonable $8.50/TB after the first 10TB/month. Despite my dislike of Oracle it's not a terrible choice for this until you get some serious traffic.
- mxuribe 2y agoHow interesting! I'm excited by all the energy lately that i've seen around more text-based fun stuff, from Gemini to tilde communities to more TUIs/TUI apps, to this ssh powered set of services! Keep 'em coming!
- bayindirh 2y agopico.sh is not new by any means. I was using them ~3 years ago (or maybe even for longer), with their lists.sh service. After I opened my blog, they launched prose.sh, and rest of the services soon after, but since I settled on my blog, and didn't want to change horses, and they discontinued lists.sh, I had to part ways with them. I admire what they've built though, and wish them best of luck.
- jarbus 2y agoI love this
- ctrlp 2y agoThis looks awesome. Well done.
- mountainriver 2y agoDidn’t Pico used to be a shell grep like search? Or was that another project?
- taylorbuley 2y agoPretty unrelated, but if you are a developer and don't have a lifetime SDF.org membership, you should.
- palata 2y agoI had never heard of that. What's your use-case for it?
- IgorPartola 2y agoIt basically dates back to when having access to a Unix system meant that you needed to be at a university or a big employer or some such. These guys provided one for free. Currently you can get some basic email, web hosting, etc. for a one time $1 donation. You can get more for a one time $36 donation. They also have internal “forums” and chat and such as well as offering a bunch of related services like VPS, dial up, VPN, a Minecraft server, etc. Realistically, you can get a lot more for a lot less with modern hosts but between nostalgia and the limited environment having a particular kind of charm, it is kinda neat.
- palata 2y agoRight. Some kind of community, in a way.
- polishdude20 2y agoSo this seems to be a membership to access a remote Unix system and share it with others?
- zenoprax 2y agoWhy SDF over a free limitless VPS? I joined SDF last year and was disappointed. I was willing to tolerate the limitations (eg. can't change your shell unless "validated"; can't even 'touch' a file...) in exchange for community but it's a ghost town. To make matters worse, IRC for new users is only available on a Sunday! I would love to give it another shot but I don't understand what its value is in 2025.
- codazoda 2y agoLove the idea. There are a couple oddities I found in the UI. 1. When you sign up the prompt says “signup”. I didn’t know what it wanted. I finally just guessed username and that was right. 2. I couldn’t get tokens to create (which they say are highly recommended). I hit c for create, entered a name, press enter. Nothing.
- antoniomika 2y agoSorry, this is a focus issue with a tui which we'll fix up soon! Should just need to hit <tab> until OK is highlighted and then press enter
- ctippett 2y agoI signed up for this awhile back when it was free, it's been hosting bibbidibobbidi.boo ever since. It's very neat.
- antoniomika 2y agoAnd we're still free! Just added some payments to help keep things running smoothly and allow us to invest in more infrastructure. pgs (static sites) and tuns (tunneling) are both multi-region for example.
- whalesalad 2y agothis is really cool but something I would want to self-host, especially for pastebin.
- codetrotter 2y agohttps://github.com/picosh/pico/tree/main/pkg/apps/pastes https://github.com/picosh/pico/tree/main/pkg/apps/pastes https://github.com/picosh/pico/blob/main/cmd/pastes/ssh/main.go https://github.com/picosh/pico/blob/main/cmd/pastes/ssh/main... These looks like they are the code for the pastebin. There’s a bunch of other code related to their other services in that repo and in their other repos as well.
- antoniomika 2y agoAnd we'd be happy for you too! All of our code/tools are open source and available here: https://github.com/picosh/pico https://github.com/picosh/pico
- qudat 2y agoCo-Founder here, thanks for the interest in our micro-saas powered by SSH. Happy to answer any questions!
- LelouBil 2y agoHey, I was just reading your docs, maybe prose.sh will be what I'll use to finally start a blog ! I noticed this mention here [0]: Because in our Go SSH server we re-implement rsync, many options are currently not supported. For example, --delete and --dry-run are not supported. But on your front page it says : Upload your static site to us: rsync --delete -rv ./public/ pgs.sh:/mysite/ So do you support delete ? One of these pages is outdated or did I miss something ? [0] https://pico.sh/file-uploads https://pico.sh/file-uploads
- antoniomika 2y agoWoops! Delete is supported, will update that as well
- cfebs 2y agoSorry if I didn't catch this on the site, but any new upcoming services you are excited about? A ssh or TUI frontend for some git/forge host like: https://forgejo.org/ https://forgejo.org/ would be pretty cool!
- vhodges 2y agohttps://pr.pico.sh/ https://pr.pico.sh/ and https://github.com/picosh/git-pr https://github.com/picosh/git-pr :-)
- larodi 2y agoam I getting this right, that for 2 bucks a month I can publish (okay tun) my dockers and very-unsafe-postgres-with-ssl publicly to selected users?
- antoniomika 2y ago
- hei-lima 2y agoThis is great! Congratulations.
- stouset 2y agoI don't seem to be able to add multiple SSH public keys. When I try to create one, I paste my pub key and hit enter and… no key is added.
- antoniomika 2y agoWe recently changed our tui framework and the functionality for focus is a bit different. You might have to hit <tab> until `ADD` is highlighted. You can also rsync/scp/sftp an authorized_keys file and we'll add that to your account!
- stouset 2y agoThat did it. Thanks!
- 0xcoffee 2y agoAt risk of scope creep, the greatest selling point Netlify has for me is automatic form email support for static sites. Would be awesome if pico.sh supported that.
- qudat 2y agohttps://pgs.sh https://pgs.sh was designed to "compete" with netlify. I'm going to look into this feature and see how it could fit into our service. Thanks so much!
- focusgroup0 2y agoSee also: https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish
- antoniomika 2y agoI'd actually highly recommend taking a look at vaxis (https://github.com/rockorager/vaxis https://github.com/rockorager/vaxis). We've moved away from wish/bubbletea and have really enjoyed working with vaxis!
- shnpln 2y agoThis is awesome!
- desireco42 2y agoI have fish shell... took me a little bit to realize that this prevents it to create account, once I created it using bash, it works well. Just FYI.
- antoniomika 2y agoHrm that's odd! Just tested and everything looks fine. Any logs or errors you can share?
- jarboot 2y agoLove to see a midwest/great lakes business address :)
- jwr 2y agoLove the idea, but I couldn't find a "pricing" page and wanted to abandon reading immediately (I have no time for unsustainable services). Then I learned from the discussion that the pricing is $2/m, which, two things: 1) I still can't find that price on the web site, and 2) it seems unsustainable to me, so I'm still worried. I run a B2B SaaS. Support costs is what eats you alive: in case of a complex B2B app anything below $40/month is unsustainable. This is of course better for simpler apps/services, but even there you have to be super careful.
- jimbosis 2y agoI had the same frustration as you with finding the pricing information. With some serendipitous clicking, I managed to find it! https://pico.sh/plus https://pico.sh/plus It does also mention there is a $0 "Starter" tier. (I found that link on this page: https://pico.sh/pgs https://pico.sh/pgs ) EDIT: Mention the Starter tier.
- lionkor 2y ago$40/month per user, just for support? So for 1000 users, you need to make $40,000 to be sustainable, i.e. like 10 employees?
- blatantly 2y agoYeah I think this why "Book a call" level customers are really subsidising it. Say $10/m/u and you get 200 seats. You pay $2000/m but the bugs you hit are likely uniform so you loaf support like maybe 20 individual users. 20 individual users only bring in 10%. So you need the whales to keep it going.
- conductr 2y agoI'm thinking not much support is needed for user's that are willing and able to do all these tasks over SSH. They've pre-filtered for low support load Back in early 2000s I ran a shared webhosting business, most customer's were savvy at the time and it was kind of a "you're on your own, let me know if the infra is acting up" type arrangement. I ran it with about 2000 customers for a year or so solo and only got about 2 support emails a day. Back then, 24-72 hour response was acceptable so I never needed to be a 24/7 resource.
- scbenet 2y agoBig fan of pico.sh, been hosting a few small sites on there for a while now, no faster way to get something up and running
- stego-tech 2y agoLove the KISS approach to your services. Simple text files, built on fundamental services. Honestly also a great way to build SSH (and associated suite) chops for folks just entering Linux/Unix/BSD/*nix world or who only know Windows. Going to poke at it this week myself. Looks like a healthy competitor to PikaPods for the basic stuff. Keep up the good work!
- TheTaytay 2y agoI stumbled across this clever service when looking for a “pastebin” that handled rendering terminal output with ANSI codes. The irony is that they don’t actually allow that (just plain text can be piped to their pastes service), but I found their whole site and vibe delightful! And the two authors, qudat, and antoniomima are active on HN, as their responsive comments here demonstrate. Just good work all around.
- sagarpatil 2y agoI’m sold.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- saunved_42 2y agoThis is a really fun project! I've been trying to think of unique ways to allow non-devs to publish blog posts easily on their own websites and this is some great inspiration for it.
- thelittleone 2y agoVery cool. Though might want to increase contrast on diagrams, for example here https://pico.sh/tuns https://pico.sh/tuns
- lynx97 2y agorsync is no SSH tool. I get how that sentence emerged, but it is still a turn off, mixing up terminology like that for convenience.
- bradly 2y agorsync uses ssh for remote communication.
- lynx97 2y agoI am sure you know this, but rsync works perfectly fine without ssh. In fact, it has its own custom protocol for remote communcation. It can use ssh to talk to remote machines, but so can any tool via the plain pipe mechanism. Followin that logic, every Linux CLI tool that does stdio is an ssh tool...
- bradly 2y ago> It can use ssh to talk to remote machines, but so can any tool via the plain pipe mechanism. Followin that logic, every Linux CLI tool that does stdio is an ssh tool... Not any others have this callout, though, from the rsync man page: > For remote transfers, a modern rsync uses ssh for its communications, but it may have been configured to use a different remote shell by default, such as rsh or remsh.
- Y_Y 2y agoIn my experience, any time you're using scp, you'd be better off with rsync.
- caioariede 2y agoI love this! I was about to start using Substack for a personal/professional blog and I was very concerned about the structure they "force" you into. I don't want to socialize in the way they want me to. I just want to write my stuff down, and perhaps help someone, but at the end, all I want is a place to share things with myself in a more elaborated way. Looking at it now!
- jefurii 2y agoIf all you want is to scp .html files there's always been shared hosting.
- gherard5555 2y agoThis web design is very nice to look at
- qudat 2y agoHey thanks! I stare at our docs site multiple times a day and sometimes I lose all sense of what looks good so your comment is much appreciated.
- oldandboring 2y agoVery timely for this to come up. Just this morning I was wiring up a personal blog with Obsidian -> Hugo -> Github Pages. I might swap Github Pages out for Pico.sh, it's definitely my kinda service. Well, either that or self-host it.
- benoror 2y agoHow does it compares with https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/?
- qudat 2y agohttps://prose.sh https://prose.sh was absolutely inspired by bearblog. We wanted to leverage SSH for content management. To the reader there is a lot of overlap in terms of minimalism and no-JS.
- Lord_Zero 2y agohttps://pgs.sh/ https://pgs.sh/ > Promotion/rollback support > Managed HTTPS for all projects > Promotion and rollback support "Promotion and rollback support" twice...
- qudat 2y agoFixed ty
- tempfile 2y agoThat's fun, I found and subscribed to tuns.sh only 2 weeks ago. (I wrote up my experience, too https://danielittlewood.xyz/notes/self-hosting-with-tunnels https://danielittlewood.xyz/notes/self-hosting-with-tunnels)
- anonfordays 2y agoSadly the CoC states: Don't upload "hate speech" (i.e. demeaning race, gender, age, religious or sexual orientation, etc.) Don't upload material that is threatening, harassing, defamatory, or that encourages violence or crime This can be contorted to mean almost anything. In times such as these where regimes all across the globe are using "hate speech" as carte blanche to snuff out dissent, it's sad to see others openly follow suite.
- bainganbharta 2y ago[dead]
- rjurney 2y agoThis thing is really cool, I want to pipe data between systems... can I trust you to have that kind of access?
- qudat 2y agoSo you probably shouldn’t trust any external service and we do have the ability to subscribe to any topic. But we have zero interest in snooping unless we discover illegal activity at which point we will take immediate action.
- rjurney 2y agoI don't really mean you, but let's say you are compromised... if I put a localhost http server up on the web using your stuff, am I now compromised? Not clear how this would work...
- hiatus 2y agoIt is strange, I tried to add my public key but received a response that it was already in use (!). Is there a way to determine the user associated with a public key? Perhaps it's possible I have previously created an account but I feel I would remember the UI.
- qudat 2y agoEmail us at hello@pico.sh and we can triage
- fragmede 2y agoSSH is kind of a secret hidden interface because of how nerdy it is, so I feel that it goes underappreciated sometimes. I host one such interface, do ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no funky.nondeterministic.computer and see what's on offer!
- paul_h 2y agoIf not using the custom domain stuff, cookies need protection via Set-Cookie with `SameSite=Strict`, right? I couldn't see a note in the documentation
- sjtgraham 2y ago$2/month is way too cheap. What's the realistic market size here? How much of that is achievable to capture within 24 months? It doesn't seem like it would even support a single developer's salary within that time. Things like this make me worry that this will not be around for long. Even an extremely talented and motivated solo founder will run out of steam earning a fraction of what their skills are worth serving the most fussy, demanding and ungrateful audience imaginable: nerds. OP increase your prices!