Regarding your scale/customer density problem, you may want to check AWS’s EC2 pricing, which bills by the second rather than the hour.
Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?
81–89 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?
#82Why do you need to spin up VMs? You could use a service like fly.io and have these running instantly.
This is an interesting project.
Is your project so technologically advanced that cypress could never get there? If so maybe you can join forces with them or sponsor them.
Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?
#83Note: when running untrusted user code don't underestimate how much of a liability this is.
It's so hard to be truly sure that there's no compromise path. Particularly when optimized for speed like you're saying.
Security vs performance is often an explicit trade off in these scenarios when it's tempting to reuse processes or volumes or VMs.
Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?
#84The tech sounds great. I'm regards to pricing, people aren't machines; you save them 9 min a day per engineer, doesn't mean you get 9 min / workday extra productivity * engineer. And that's not about laziness or anything, good programmers also need time to think about things abstractly etc. I wish you luck in getting properly compensated though what you did sounds great.
Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?
#851. Why can't you use something like AWS Fargate and spin up the required number of VMs as needed to keep your running costs completely variable?
2. Similar to many other comments here, you should price your service based on value offered to the customer (i.e., how much $ they are likely to save based on some engineering cost model) as opposed to a cost-plus-margin model.
3. Once you have a critical mass of clients and tests running, you can then optimize your Fargate pool with spot instances.
Starting with #1 will give you a floor for your running costs and if you tack your other costs (overheads) and a desired margin on top of that you will have a floor price. Then you just need to figure out the value you are providing (and you can A/B test that with prices higher than the floor price you obtain).
Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?
#86We pay around 1500 per year for 8 cores (~10 tests on puppeteer). If your service offers not only test parallelization but also isolation of tests then that is powerful.
Charging per test runtime in seconds is also a good idea.
As for pricing, look at Browserstack, browserless, Saucelabs. They are well established players.
Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?
#87[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?
#88Inspired by all of you, I've secured an _amazing_ project name. It is going to be a while before I launch it to the public, but this is exciting.
Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?
#89We've built a similar thing for playwright tests but on cheaper lambda functions if anyones interested! https://github.com/mentimeter/play-lambda