Show HN: Preview environments for projects that do not use K8s/Docker

Launch HN: A preview envi

Hi hn, I'm excited to share https://codepreview.io with al of you, a project we have been working on since last year. After getting a few customers providing very nice comments, I finally feel brave enough to share this to the public.

CodePreview's main goal is to provide preview environments to web applications that haven't got into the K8s/containers path. In our Software Develipment company, we mainly work with small to mid-size businesses where K8s/containers are rare.

Becoming a unicor is not our goal, instead, we aim to get enough revenue to fund a team to maintain and keep improving the project. This is why we don't have any investors, we funded CodePreview's developemt through the revenue generated from our Software Development company.

There are many competitors that offer preview environments for K8s/Containerized projects, some of them even offer help to migrate to K8s/Containers, we are different in this sense because we adapt to the project instead of asking the project to adapt to us.

While we are still in an early stage, CodePreview has been usable for several months with no critical bugs reported, on the contrary, CodePreview has proven to be very useful for these cases with our customers:

1. A company where CodePreview exposes only the backend-api, allowing the frontend team to get experimental features integrated even though the frontend team does not have access to the backend code, normally, the company would have required to provide a brand-new environment which will be maintained by them, CodePreview has been working great for this use case.

2. Another company used CodePreview for a early stage project where founders are frequently running experiments, CodePreview has allowed them to compare multiple versions at the same time even though they don't have anyone managing the infrastructure, it's just CodePreview.

I'd be thrilled to answer any questions.

BONUS: https://codepreview.io has a button for hn users where you can join a room to discuss this project live (no-login required), I intend to leave this for a few hours.

Thanks!

EDIT: I set my title as "Launch HN" but it was automatically changed to "Show HN", I guess this is an hn restriction.

I'm also part of the team and I'll be happy to answer questions too.

> what's the backend for Code Preview?

This is an interesting question, the codepreview integration can operate without a backend, in fact, some existing integrations work this way.

Still, a backend helps to:

1. Distribute the necessary settings/scripts to create a preview, this is now handled by a plain-old (password-protected) file server.

2. Allow users to manage their projects, for example, set variables/secrets, configure a custom domain, etc.

> how is it different from other companies

The main difference is that we did not go to the K8s way, which help us to easily integrate projects without asking our customers to adapt their project to us.

Besides that, there are no bots behind our contact pages, so far, we have a very close relationship with our customers.

> like Retool, Zeet, etc.

I wasn't aware about these tools, still, they seem to be tools for creating applications while codepreview allows generating previews for existing applications.

Hmmm… I guess this puts Code Preview in the Netlify / Vercel camp… although those projects are richer in their feature sets around deployment tooling.

Is that a fair comparison?

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for clarifying.

Hope my questions help you in making an sharper elevator pitch to customers.