Its great that this is free for disposable use.
We need more of these. There are too many sandboxes that charge insane prices.
Curious what this runs on though and it would be great if this was completely open source.
Great work!
back
2 comments
I know a guy who gets a bunch of old hardware as a recycler, We made the Shell On Demand Appliance for DEFCON[1] awhile back and would love to expand it, but power/internet would just cost too much. we have the hardware and software to do this. just not the long term recurring
This is interesting. A quick calculation with AI suggests pricing for cents/core/GB/hour suggests cost for power+net is 0.5cent/core/GB/hour assuming "average load" (web browsing, installing packages). Or in otherwords ~$3.60 a month for a "tiny machine" on this load 24/7. I'm guessing with actual "per human" usage the cost per person is 10 - 30x lower. So you can serve 1000 people for free a month if you have $300 to pay for power/net.
I took this further and developed a table of breakeven and profit costs for different user sizes:
Total Users | Tiny Machines (15× / 25×) | Residential Cost/mo | Colo Cost/mo | Break-even Paying @ $3/mo | Profit Factor @ 10% pay
----------- | ------------------------- | ------------------- | --------------- | ------------------------- | -----------------------
100 | 7 / 4 | $14 – $25 | $20 – $35 | 5 – 12 | 0.86× – 2.08×
1,000 | 67 / 40 | $144 – $241 | $200 – $335 | 48 – 112 | 0.90× – 2.08×
10,000 | 667 / 400 | $1,440 – $2,401 | $2,000 – $3,335 | 480 – 1,112 | 0.90× – 2.08×
1,000,000 | 66,667 / 40,000 | $144k – $240k | $200k – $333k | 48k – 111k | 0.90× – 2.08×
My gut says these prices are still 20-30% too high at the mid-high end tho.
Yes, we do! Thank you for the compliment :)
We need more of this because compute is trending infinitely cheaper. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow - but inference and training of AI will eventually breakthrough to optimal and cost way less. The oversupply of compute will provide "baseload" compute for all. GH was just way ahead of its time with free action minutes on every account. The Global Free Tier, is coming :)
In fact, it's already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet :)