back
76 comments
Can someone define "val"? I don't think that I've seen that, before.
Great 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.

I assumed it was a play on "value town"?

I'll add a +1 to praising your (sadly rare) ability to actually explain what your product does on your product's landing page. I got it instantly from your tagline "If GitHub Gists could run And AWS Lambda were fun".

I can see myself using this for one-off scripts and personal stuff. Out of curiosity, is it intended for more than that as well?

I 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.
Any 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.

From the website: "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."
It looks like a "Function as a Service" offering, comparable to AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, Netlify Functions, GCP Cloud Functions, and so on.
Could 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-t...

This requires running Chrome on the VM though

Does this work with Val?

I 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?
Congrats 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!

Thanks!!
I'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.

Such 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.

I'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.
I think the unit of runs/minute is wrong. Shouldn't it be a bare quantity, not a number of milliseconds?
Great catch, thanks! Pushing a fix now...
I 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

This 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.
I 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

Looks really compelling, Steve! Fingers crossed for your success with it. Looking forward to play around with Val Town when time permits.
Thanks!!
Cool product and great execution! I've had the idea to build something like this for a while, but I'd rather use this.
Thanks! Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions :)
I 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.
Great idea! Right now we recommend https://ntfy.sh/ but you're right, we probably should do it bundled into the service
I'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.

I 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

Thanks! 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:
This 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!
This looks really useful. Simple pitch and lots of potential applications. Say hi to Dan!
Hi,

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)

Many of the static webhosting sites can pull from GitHub. That seems pretty automatable.
You 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 ?

Not very similar at all
What 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?
Something similar I’ve been using is RunKit. It’s easy to quickly test something out and forget about. Will keep Val in mind though!
What runtime do the vals run on? Deno?

What are the limitations?

Yes, it's Deno. What other limitations are you curious about besides the ones listed on the pricing page?
I feel like this is begging for an open source version that just runs as Github Actions.
Reminds me of Auth0 webtasks (R.I.P), which was a stellar product
Looks good, Steve!!
Thanks Wil!!
It 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.

You understand it, I understand it, everyone understands it: it's just a purely aesthetic choice.
Apologies! I've been in a lowercase mood recently
Especially since bandwidth is usually measured in bits, and storage in bytes. Units matter!