Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

When buying software the cost is heavily impacted by the number of users that benefit. Windows is used by >100m users, a new browser is probably doing well if it's used by >100. Of course the price is different.

Investors like to see revenue, when they are looking to make an investment.

So I watched the demo, read the pitch, and read this whole thread trying to understand why anyone would think that a subscription browser could work as a business, and I think I finally see where they could go that might be interesting. It's right there in the name.

A steadily increasing fraction of work is happening in web apps - especially Electron apps that we download and run as "sort of real apps." The HN crowd, including me, loves to bemoan this as "real native apps" generally run faster and offer a better user experience.

But the thing about all the electron apps out there is that the majority are really native to the browser, and the electron version doesn't offer that much enhancement to what you get just running it in a browser tab. The reason most of us stop running those "always on" apps in browser tabs is more because it's clutter rather than because running the desktop app makes a huge user experience difference.

What might be possible if you designed a browser specifically for running many web apps at a time? A web-app OS. You could converge on better universal keyboard shortcuts. Get better performance and less disk space by not having a dozen full copies of chromium hanging out on your computer. Keep things organized as they've shown with workspaces.

But you could probably also bundle a lot of enterprise features in over time. What if the browser had SSO/SAML baked in so that when the company provisions the laptop employees are automatically logged in to all web based services with 2FA etc? Zero trust isn't easy for lower-tech users, and corporate security is worth a lot of money.

In a way it's like, what if ChromeOS wasn't an attempt at a full replacement operating system (which can work for many use cases, but it's a hard transition), and instead "SigmaOS" can be the virtual machine that you live your web-app life in without cutting you off from your "traditional" operating system?

It's an interesting idea, and I'm curious to see where it goes.

Now back to pricing, I find it really hard to believe this makes sense for individuals to pay $15/mo for. But companies? Maybe. So, my advice to the Sigma team would be to keep testing pricing, and if you want to validate the idea that pro users will pay maybe try something like $15/_year_ as an "early access price" for individuals, with "team plans coming soon," or something like that.

Thanks for the kind words and for trying out SigmaOS. Glad we could improve your workflow :)

Damn, that's a great breakdown, and discusses a lot of the things we've been thinking about and what led us towards building SigmaOS the way we are.

I'm actually implementing the Chrome extensions API, so SigmaOS will have the same extensions available as Chrome :D