Not a mobile issue. I am on desktop and had no idea what this service was because nothing on the initial UI explained what we were looking at. I went and double-checked when people here were talking about pricing and VMs. From the home page, I figured it was some text-based game or experiment and closed the page.
It looks like some people who work there are watching this thread, so to them I say: You have got to explain what this is, not just say "the disk persists..." and expect people to dig deeper. Most aren't that curious.
Hyperbole much? I'm on mobile and think it's great. I wish more websites were like this. Just straight to the point instead of all the regular marketing fluff you need to decipher.
I wouldn’t go that far but some link to pricing and documentation would be useful. I have absolutely no idea what the offering is here without those pieces of info.
So I tried this the other day after Filippo Valsorda, another Go person, posted about it. My reaction was 'whoa, this really makes it easier to start a quick project', and it took a minute to figure out why I felt that way when, I mean, I have a laptop and could spin up cloud stuff--arguably I already had what I needed.
I think it's the combination of 1) really quick to get going, 2) isolated and disposable environments and 3) can be persistent and out there on the Internet.
Often to get element 3, persistent and public, I had to jump through hoops in a cloud console and/or mess with my 'main' resources (install things or do other sysadmin work on a laptop or server, etc.), resources I use for other stuff and would prefer not to clutter up with every experiment I attempt.
Here I can make a thing and if I'm done, I'm done, nothing else impacted, or if it's useful it can stick around and become shared or public. Some other environments also have 'quick to start, isolated, and disposable' down, but are ephemeral only, limited, or don't have great publishing or sharing, and this avoids that trough too. And VMs go well with building general-purpose software you could fling onto any machine, not tied to a proprietary thing.
This is good stuff. I hope they get a sustainable paid thing going. I'd sign up.
Also, though I realize in a sense it'd be competition to a business I just said I like: some parts of the design could work elsewhere too. You could have an open-source "click here to start a thing! and click here to archive it." layer above a VM, machine, or whatever sort of cloud account; could be a lot of fun. (I imagine someone will think "have you looked at X?" here, and yes, chime in, interested in all sorts of potential values of X.)
This is cool. I am currently using GitHub codespaces and I would love a version of it with nothing but a web based terminal. I don't need all the other windows they put around it. This might be it.
Trying my way around it now. Not sure what is going on:
me: apt install apache
the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found: "apt"
What is "exe.dev repl"? Am I not in a shell?
me: bash
the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found: "bash"
[exe.dev co-founder here] Hi there, I am not sure exactly where you are, but your VM is ubuntu derived and definitely starts with apt and bash. Perhaps try `ssh yourvm.exe.xyz`?
You can do the same thing - with the added burden of actually having to set it up once ... After you set it up, it's however just as trivial to add new systems like with this linked example.
I got pretty much everything I'm self-hosting like that via keycloak (which itself let's me do social with via GitHub and Google etc pp) and a very similar nginx config like it's shown in these docs.
But the initial setup took multiple hours, even if the adding new services which support forward/proxy auth is extremely easy now.
(Jellyfin sadly doesn't as an example)
Just saying it in case you want to check it out.
I think it's fantastic they added that/provide this to their platform - it's a wonderful value-add
I think running and managing and possibly misconfiguring a keycloak java monolith would be exactly what I'd want to avoid which is why it's cool that they offer this.
There are a lot other identity providers around you can pick from, I merely mentioned it as I personally use it, as it's so easy to run and integrate with social auth - and comes with features such as simple password-less auth.
The forward auth/proxy auth is not a keycloak feature, it's a proxy feature, which just need some identity provider. If you look for the mentioned term via Google or AI/llm you will find multiple options, some of which are as easy to setup as a simple docker run cmd with an open port
I signed up and started a VM. Didn’t really expect the default chat interface at boot. I’m currently on my iPad and would probably have bookmarked it for later, but now I’m playing with it. Cool idea :)
Edit: it comes out of the box with screenshot capabilities. The defaults on this are very well considered. Im impressed within the first 15 min.
Edit2: this is very neat. I will be recommending it to my non-coder friends who don’t really have the local setup to use Claude but would like to try a Claude-like tool.
Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain (too good to be true?); other cloud providers charge hundreds of dollars per month for an equivalent VM.
If, OTOH, it's 2 CPUs/8GB total, Hetzner offers an equivalent VM for about $5/month (with much more disk and bandwidth), and I'm not sure what the exe.dev value proposition is. (I'm also not sure why one would want to split 25 VMs across so few shared CPUs/such little memory.)
No I apologize for the confusion (exe.dev person here). What is different about this service is you get dedicated resources that you share between your VMs. The initial allocation is conservative, we want to give people more (or drop the price).
The goal is to reduce the marginal cost of creating a VM to zero. Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM.
(I will get a better version of this table online tonight.)
>Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM.
What is the advantage of this? Unless you need something exotic like different kernel configurations per instance, what's the problem with using containers on the same instance?
BTW, a Hetzner dedicated server with 2 CPUs/8GB RAM that would let me run my own hypervisor is about $14 USD/month. For anyone who's a big enough power user to care about the distinction of running distributed workflows on VMs versus containers, I'm not sure that an extra $5/month is worth your "hypervisor as a service." But then again, HN commenters infamously poopooed Dropbox [0], so what do I know? :-)
Containers aren’t enough for me. I like to do things like create TUN devices, run docker compose, etc. I believe the VM is a fundamentally better abstraction.
Consider this: sometimes when you are using a VPS, you start a new project and say to yourself, "I should put this on a new VPS." Not all the time, but it does happen. And when it does, we are faced with the problem that starting a new project immediately costs us $X/month. I would like a new project to initially cost nothing.
The docs remark “VMs share the resources allocated to the user” so I interpret as resources allocated to your account, VMs provisioned within those limits.
Dang, everything about this feels really well considered. Semi-throwaway, nearly bare-metal machines that I can put on the internet with basically 0 config? I'll take
This is freaking fantastic. However, as a community college instructor I would like to have this self-hosted on a computer in campus. Excluding the CLI niceties, etc., it shouldn't be to hard to get a similar setup with Docker et al, right? (not for production)
Oh I’m going to need more info than this. It’s a service that provides persistent disk and VM’s but doesn’t tell you what those shared resource limits are, what the pricing is, or anything other than to ssh in…
Hello, an exe.dev person here. There are some very early docs, exe.dev/docs (which are also accessible over ssh once you ssh in). There is a lot more to come, very early days, please bear with us. I was not expecting to see it here today.
I have played with it and it's so easy get started with that now I want a quick-project idea as an excuse to use it!
I'm sure you've thought of this, but: lots of people have some amount of 'free' (or really: zero incremental cost to users) access to some coding chat tool through a subscription or free allowance like Google's.
If you wanted to let those programs access your custom tools (browser!) and docs about the environment, a low-fuss way might be to drop a skills/ dir of info and executables that call your tools into new installs' homedirs, and/or a default AGENTS.md with the basic info and links to more.
And this seems like more fuss, but if you wanted to be able to expose to the Web whatever coding tool people 'bring', similar to how you expose your built-in chat, there's apparently an "agent control protocol" used as a sort of cross-vendor SDK by projects like https://willmcgugan.github.io/toad-released/ that try to put a nice interface on top of everything. Not saying this'd be easy at all, but you could imagine the choice between a few coding tools and auth info for them as profile-level settings pushed to new VMs. Or maybe no special settings, and bringing your own tools is just a special case of bringing your own image or setup script.
But, as y'all note, it's a VM. You can install whatever and use it through the terminal (or VSCode remoting or something else). "It's a computer" is quite a good open standard to build on.
Thanks! We are thinking a lot about how to prepopulate VMs. The first thing we are going to start with is a fast ‘clone’ command, so you can preconfigure a base VM then make as many as you like. Lots of other ideas floating around too.
Re sketch: the code is not the same but the agent is deeply inspired by it. Eg the screenshot support, which just seems obvious to us. Philip has done the heavy lifting here, he hangs out in the discord if you want to chat about it.
I really enjoyed using this service. I signed up on my phone two nights ago, (using termux + ssh) and then used the builtin web agent to setup a small webapp. I was up and running with an HTTPS server in minutes, since all the HTTPS certs are automatically taken care of.
I'm not using it yet, but the way that it handles sharing looks incredibly sweet: an excellent way to take "home-cooked software and bare-foot developers" "perfect software: an audience of one" from one to a few / many people. Just sharing links that people can easily sign into, without having to build a whole auth system seems ridiculously easy here, and that is super cool. You don't have to think about it, you can just build your app: this fills a huge gap that makes making connected online software so much easier. https://outofdesk.netlify.app/blog/perfect-softwarehttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334206https://exe.dev/docs/sharing
I used the included Shelley agent, which has a perfectly adequate simple web ui, to do all development. It was able to debug a bunch of pretty gnarly problems, using screenshots & scrolling down to get check it's work.
My output is a super simple site, very close to vibe coded, in ~90 minutes, but I quite enjoyed setting up a little guestbook project here: https://nan-falcon.exe.xyz/
[exe.dev co-founder here] Thank you! Not to give too many secrets away, but my hope is to follow a business model I have been part of before, and make it as cheap as possible for individuals so they encourage their employers to buy it for work. So I would very much love to get cheaper.
The two constraints are that, one, when small underlying resources are expensive (we hope to fix that soon by not being small!), and two, we do not want to make the resource allocation so small that the VM feels unpleasant to use. So there is a floor on how small we make them.
That said, I very very much want to drop prices. We started with conservative numbers.
Hello, I am behind this company. My co-founder Josh Bleecher Snyder has also been hanging around the internet for a while. There are several of us hacking away. It is very early days, we have a lot of work to do to earn your trust but it is my intention to do so.
Both are also early Go engineers and developers who hacked on the Go stdlib for years. Most people in the Go community know them. Great people, and the idea speaks for it. I wish them best of luck.
Might be a good place for yunohost/coolify style services, especially if you have multiple separate entities - though probably tricky to do inbound mail because of IP allocation?
[exe.dev co-founder here] It is planned! The reason we have not got to it yet is it needs to be very different than IPv4 support. We have spent a lot of time on machinery to allow `ssh yourmachine.exe.xyz` work without having to allocate you an IPv4 address. The mechanisms for IPv6 can and should be different, but they will also interact with how assigning public static IPv4 addresses will work in the future.
We do not want to end up in the state AWS is in, where any production work requires navigating the differences between how AWS manage v4 and v6. And that means rolling out v6 is going to be a lot of work for us. It will get done.
The description of authentication mechanism is confusing me. it’s over ssh, but how is this integrated?
> Private by default, share with discord-style links exe.dev takes care of TLS and auth for you. By default only you can reach your HTTP services, and you have easy mechanims to share them with friends and colleagues.
You ssh in with any key, and it asks you for an email to verify. You're then at a exe.dev console.
There are a couple different link patterns:
exe.dev ▶ doc sharing
Sharing (sharing) - press q to exit
You can share your VM's HTTP port (see the http proxy documentation /proxy) with your friends. There are three mechanisms:
1. Make the HTTP proxy public with share set-public <vm>. To point the proxy
at a different port inside the VM, run share port <vm> <port> first.
Marking it public lets anyone access the server without logging in.
2. Add specific e-mail addresses using share add <vm> <email>. This will
send the recipient an e-mail. They can then log into exe.dev with that e-mail,
and access https://vmname.exe.xyz/.
3. Create a share link with share add-link <vm>. The generated
link will allow anyone access to the page, after they register and login.
Revoking the link (which can be done with the remove-link command)
does not revoke their access, but you can remove users who are already
part of the share using share remove <vm> <email>.
Thanks! love the idea, looking forward to playing with this. I understand now from comments that this was brought to this site sooner than intended, sorry if I asked in a rude way.
Hello, an exe.dev person here. They are VMs, on a crosvm-derived VMM. So I consider them "actually VMs", though we do not currently support custom kernels. You can do VM things in there, like create TUN devices, etc.
Thank you! Yes, KVM. And public IPs are very useful and we want to do them. We will have to charge and/or limit them, unlike VMs, unfortunately, because IPv4 is scarce. (I am busy trying to buy some right now.) You can follow along here: https://github.com/boldsoftware/exe.dev/issues/6
Not super important to me (and you state explicitly it may change) but your docs are a little out of date here, I think. crosvm versus Cloud Hypervisor / Kata Containers, is, I think, different?
exe.dev ▶ doc how-exedev-works
How exe.dev works (how-exedev-works) - press q to exit
You're an engineer. We're engineers. Let's talk about what's going on under the hood.
An "exe.dev" VM runs on a bare metal machine that exe.dev rents. We happen to use Kata Containers and Cloud Hypervisor, but that's a bit of an implementation detail (and may change!).
With most providers, your VM starts with a "base image" and is given a block device. Exe.dev instead starts with a container image (by default, "exeuntu"), and hooks up an overlay filesystem to the VM. This makes creating a new VM
take about two seconds. In exchange, we lose some flexibility: you don't get to choose which filesystem you're using, nor which kernel you're using.
On the networking side, we don't give your VM its own public IP. Instead, we terminate HTTPS/TLS requests, and proxy them securely to your VM's web servers. For SSH, we handle ssh vmname.exe.xyz.
I have not used E2B (though I really like their web site), though it looks like there are quite a few differences. Our disks are persistent (without manual snapshotting), we have a TLS proxy by default with built-in auth and link sharing.
It also looks like they have many features we do not have (yet).
I believe the target use is also quite different. You can use exe.dev VMs for running your agent. But you can also use it for hosting your site. E.g. blog.exe.dev is an exe.dev VM.
Thanks for the response. In the "How exe works" page, it's mentioned that exe runs on bare metal with Kata containers, how is it different from firecracker? Were there any advantages?
The mention of Kata is out of date, we are fixing that, thanks! Our underlying VMM is very similar to firecracker (same upstream source). We believe our advantages are in how we run it. Several blog posts are in the works about technical details!
Simpler and easier seems to be the answer. How much does it cost to spread 8gbs RAM across some VMs? Most providers require additional of how many VMs over how many hours, what the specs kf each are specifically, etc. Then once you have it you're setting up an SSH key or shared password depending on use and they make the authentication simpler as well. Maybe wouldn't be great for a huge business but it's you just wanted the ability to play with an isolated server, it might be worth it.
Thanks, I couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong. The front page is just... not helpful. Given the amount of pushbash how everyone feels about this, it should be removed from HN frontpage!
Thanks. I feel like I expect home pages to contain at least a modicum of information. And three seconds spent thinking about accessibility would have told them that light gray links on a white background are a terrible idea...
Apologies for the vagueness of the home page, we were not expecting to be here today. There is a little more info in our first blog post https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev and docs, but far needs to be written.
(We have also built some interesting tech behind this that we are excited to write up, I have a doc two pages long of blog posts we want to write.)
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
I just tried this out in Firefox on macOS and there are no issues, so this might have something to do with our LetsEncrypt wildcard cert and the CA roots installed on Android. Could you tell me what version of Android you are using?
[exe.dev co-founder] Hi! There is a mobile site. It is not super visible right now but you can use it to create VMs (and even build something on them with our agent if you like). If you ran into a particular bug I would love to get it in the issue tracker so we can fix it.
Zero information available on mobile.
I thought it is some kind of portfolio site that does not work on mobile.
Homepage -> blog -> docs -> "all docs" button:
https://exe.dev/docs/list
Which has an about and pricing etc.
That is very counterintuitive to just find out what this is.
It looks like some people who work there are watching this thread, so to them I say: You have got to explain what this is, not just say "the disk persists..." and expect people to dig deeper. Most aren't that curious.
It's really annoying when you're interested in a product but can't find a price.
> ssh exe.dev
> The disk persists. You have sudo.
on mobile
And cannot open keyboard if that is needed. It is like big CTA but does not do anything.
Very strange landing page for maybe cool product.
I think it's the combination of 1) really quick to get going, 2) isolated and disposable environments and 3) can be persistent and out there on the Internet.
Often to get element 3, persistent and public, I had to jump through hoops in a cloud console and/or mess with my 'main' resources (install things or do other sysadmin work on a laptop or server, etc.), resources I use for other stuff and would prefer not to clutter up with every experiment I attempt.
Here I can make a thing and if I'm done, I'm done, nothing else impacted, or if it's useful it can stick around and become shared or public. Some other environments also have 'quick to start, isolated, and disposable' down, but are ephemeral only, limited, or don't have great publishing or sharing, and this avoids that trough too. And VMs go well with building general-purpose software you could fling onto any machine, not tied to a proprietary thing.
This is good stuff. I hope they get a sustainable paid thing going. I'd sign up.
Also, though I realize in a sense it'd be competition to a business I just said I like: some parts of the design could work elsewhere too. You could have an open-source "click here to start a thing! and click here to archive it." layer above a VM, machine, or whatever sort of cloud account; could be a lot of fun. (I imagine someone will think "have you looked at X?" here, and yes, chime in, interested in all sorts of potential values of X.)
Trying my way around it now. Not sure what is going on:
What is "exe.dev repl"? Am I not in a shell? Damn, it seems the "shell" is not a Linux shell?Thanks for trying it!
Oh, I think I found a real shell now! You have to click "VMs" then on the VM and then "Terminal".
Yay, this is great!
[1] https://exe.dev/docs/login-with-exe
You can do the same thing - with the added burden of actually having to set it up once ... After you set it up, it's however just as trivial to add new systems like with this linked example.
I got pretty much everything I'm self-hosting like that via keycloak (which itself let's me do social with via GitHub and Google etc pp) and a very similar nginx config like it's shown in these docs.
But the initial setup took multiple hours, even if the adding new services which support forward/proxy auth is extremely easy now.
(Jellyfin sadly doesn't as an example)
Just saying it in case you want to check it out.
I think it's fantastic they added that/provide this to their platform - it's a wonderful value-add
The forward auth/proxy auth is not a keycloak feature, it's a proxy feature, which just need some identity provider. If you look for the mentioned term via Google or AI/llm you will find multiple options, some of which are as easy to setup as a simple docker run cmd with an open port
I.e. https://docs.goauthentik.io/add-secure-apps/providers/proxy/...
Edit: it comes out of the box with screenshot capabilities. The defaults on this are very well considered. Im impressed within the first 15 min. Edit2: this is very neat. I will be recommending it to my non-coder friends who don’t really have the local setup to use Claude but would like to try a Claude-like tool.
— $20/month
— 25 VMs
— 2 CPUs
— 8GB RAM
— 25GB disk
— 100GB bandwidth
Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain (too good to be true?); other cloud providers charge hundreds of dollars per month for an equivalent VM.
If, OTOH, it's 2 CPUs/8GB total, Hetzner offers an equivalent VM for about $5/month (with much more disk and bandwidth), and I'm not sure what the exe.dev value proposition is. (I'm also not sure why one would want to split 25 VMs across so few shared CPUs/such little memory.)
The goal is to reduce the marginal cost of creating a VM to zero. Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM.
(I will get a better version of this table online tonight.)
What is the advantage of this? Unless you need something exotic like different kernel configurations per instance, what's the problem with using containers on the same instance?
BTW, a Hetzner dedicated server with 2 CPUs/8GB RAM that would let me run my own hypervisor is about $14 USD/month. For anyone who's a big enough power user to care about the distinction of running distributed workflows on VMs versus containers, I'm not sure that an extra $5/month is worth your "hypervisor as a service." But then again, HN commenters infamously poopooed Dropbox [0], so what do I know? :-)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Consider this: sometimes when you are using a VPS, you start a new project and say to yourself, "I should put this on a new VPS." Not all the time, but it does happen. And when it does, we are faced with the problem that starting a new project immediately costs us $X/month. I would like a new project to initially cost nothing.
The only difference is the bandwidth: vps in europe givr you 10 tiles that, unmeterred.
Very cool for training: I can make people log into those vm and deploy nginx just for learning.
I'm sure you've thought of this, but: lots of people have some amount of 'free' (or really: zero incremental cost to users) access to some coding chat tool through a subscription or free allowance like Google's.
If you wanted to let those programs access your custom tools (browser!) and docs about the environment, a low-fuss way might be to drop a skills/ dir of info and executables that call your tools into new installs' homedirs, and/or a default AGENTS.md with the basic info and links to more.
And this seems like more fuss, but if you wanted to be able to expose to the Web whatever coding tool people 'bring', similar to how you expose your built-in chat, there's apparently an "agent control protocol" used as a sort of cross-vendor SDK by projects like https://willmcgugan.github.io/toad-released/ that try to put a nice interface on top of everything. Not saying this'd be easy at all, but you could imagine the choice between a few coding tools and auth info for them as profile-level settings pushed to new VMs. Or maybe no special settings, and bringing your own tools is just a special case of bringing your own image or setup script.
But, as y'all note, it's a VM. You can install whatever and use it through the terminal (or VSCode remoting or something else). "It's a computer" is quite a good open standard to build on.
Is the chat descended from Sketch?
Re sketch: the code is not the same but the agent is deeply inspired by it. Eg the screenshot support, which just seems obvious to us. Philip has done the heavy lifting here, he hangs out in the discord if you want to chat about it.
Also, telling Shelley to get inspiration from the VM name can be fun.
I love the idea of just ssh in and do your thing. I’ll bookmark and come back when there’s some more info. Things are going to move fast…
I'm not using it yet, but the way that it handles sharing looks incredibly sweet: an excellent way to take "home-cooked software and bare-foot developers" "perfect software: an audience of one" from one to a few / many people. Just sharing links that people can easily sign into, without having to build a whole auth system seems ridiculously easy here, and that is super cool. You don't have to think about it, you can just build your app: this fills a huge gap that makes making connected online software so much easier. https://outofdesk.netlify.app/blog/perfect-software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334206 https://exe.dev/docs/sharing
I used the included Shelley agent, which has a perfectly adequate simple web ui, to do all development. It was able to debug a bunch of pretty gnarly problems, using screenshots & scrolling down to get check it's work.
My output is a super simple site, very close to vibe coded, in ~90 minutes, but I quite enjoyed setting up a little guestbook project here: https://nan-falcon.exe.xyz/
The two constraints are that, one, when small underlying resources are expensive (we hope to fix that soon by not being small!), and two, we do not want to make the resource allocation so small that the VM feels unpleasant to use. So there is a floor on how small we make them.
That said, I very very much want to drop prices. We started with conservative numbers.
> David Crawshaw - before this, CTO and co-founder of Tailscale
> Josh Bleecher Snyder - was a Director of Engineering at Braintree, amongst other things
We do not want to end up in the state AWS is in, where any production work requires navigating the differences between how AWS manage v4 and v6. And that means rolling out v6 is going to be a lot of work for us. It will get done.
I added a public tracking bug here: https://github.com/boldsoftware/exe.dev/issues/16
> Private by default, share with discord-style links exe.dev takes care of TLS and auth for you. By default only you can reach your HTTP services, and you have easy mechanims to share them with friends and colleagues.
Is anyone with access to a link able to get in?
Edit: Answered below, thank you.
There are a couple different link patterns:
I have not used E2B (though I really like their web site), though it looks like there are quite a few differences. Our disks are persistent (without manual snapshotting), we have a TLS proxy by default with built-in auth and link sharing.
It also looks like they have many features we do not have (yet).
I believe the target use is also quite different. You can use exe.dev VMs for running your agent. But you can also use it for hosting your site. E.g. blog.exe.dev is an exe.dev VM.
So, exactly what you said, but for the benefit of the user, and for the profit of the company, by offering an excellent product.
(I am a happy customer of their previous product, Sketch.dev.)
(We have also built some interesting tech behind this that we are excited to write up, I have a doc two pages long of blog posts we want to write.)
https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev
Secure Connection Failed
https://exe.dev/docs/how-exedev-works
https://exe.dev/docs/pricing
If the downvotes were inappropriate, other users will usually correct them. In this case the comment ended up being heavily upvoted.
Unfortunately, complaints like the one you added don't get garbage-collected when that happens, so they linger on, adding noise to the thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html