If a machine is too weak to run an app compiled to native code, how is downloading a JS version and running that any better? If anything, it would need more RAM and more CPU, not less, apart from the additional network bandwidth.

> how is downloading a JS version and running that any better?

That's not really what this app seems to do. When you run an application on this neverinstall product, it doesn't magically transpile the native app into JavaScript. The app still runs natively on a real virtual server on a server farm somewhere.

The only JavaScript your browser downloads & interprets is the networking & rendering code necessary to connect to what is essentially a VPS.

But yes, I agree. This is a network bandwidth (+ privacy!) nightmare.

It's Remote-Desktop-as-a-Service

This is not running the code on your browser instead it is just live streaming the frames and then rendering the pixels on your your browser.

Yeah ironically browsers insane RAM consumption means your 'thin clients' would need to be reasonably powerful to run this anyway.

Not to mention that to run multiple apps and have them be visible means you need multiple instances of the video streaming active...

I can't speak to this particular implementation, but I have set up thin clients for schools using VMware's Horizon suite and Xen's XenApp before. Properly configured and with the right types of applications, their respective protocols can be very efficient.

Does that cost £1400 per year per user, though?

No. If it did it would make more sense to just buy the hardware like you said. I was only referring to your last point on network bandwidth.

It’s because nobody making a startup nowadays knows how to do anything but pay 4000x margins to AWS.

On the flip side, if you know how to not do that it's a competitive advantage.

That is a pretty underrated take.

We are blessed with a platform team who know what they're doing even with their small resource budget.

As a PO I am sure that deliver us value for money when it comes to how we execute our codebase.

I think people that have low power machines will also have slow internet (with exceptions, of course)

I stick to underpowered laptops that are easier to lug around and run all my resource-hungry stuff in the cloud, and I have decent internet connections, so that niche exist I guess. I'm still not in their target market of course (and no good idea who might be)

I think the key difference is yours and mine concept of 'underpowered'.

Their cheapest seat has 5gb ram. If I had a laptop with 8gb RAM I would consider it under powered.

If I had 4gb, as low as tolerable, why would I pay a premium for 1gb extra with a likely probably throttled CPU.

It's not so much about raw specs for me, but how I can utilize what I have. I use a GCP instance that usually is set to a bit weaker specs than my laptop (I can resize it pretty quickly, so that's not always true), but I can run it at 100% utilization for hours, use all of its RAM without worrying about browser tabs swapping, use TBs of storage, yet my own device stays nice and cool and battery doesn't get drained as fast. It's not about what I can torture my laptop hardware into delivering, but what it can handle easily, and what I do could be done completely locally on a beefier laptop (it's not that resource-intensive), but I'd rather not have anything bulkier than a 13" Macbook (and would rather downgrade to something even more nimble) than upgrade – maybe a 12" M1 fanless?)

So I guess this may be aimed at a similar niche – laptop not enough to run everything well, but the most important things, and use such a service for the occasional peek into a CAD file or the like. Pricing would still turn me off, but I'm certainly not their target audience.

In a single instance of 4GB RAM and 2vCPU only one app is running as opposed to entire desktop applications running on usual 8GB machines. We are not saying the platform will and should replace your desktops or laptops, infact we feel both will co-exist together. Users could do activities specific to cloud apps like - use the browsers as VPN, leisure activities, testing their weekend fun projects, conducting interviews on the dev tools they use in their companies etc.

It's like Rent-2-Own, but for software! And no ownership!

Is their offer better than a $40 / month VPS?

Not comparable because its not a VPS. I.E its a hourly billed system you can run GUI apps on. It is not a web server.

Also its not £ /month. It's hourly. To run 24 hours a day the cost would be 3x more.

It is a VPS though, just one with a preconfigured remote web access portal. It's also perfectly possible to compare the services even though one is price /h and the other /m - it'd be equivilant to rent an equivalently specced windows VPS as what they list for 1 month as it would be to use this for ~25 hours in 1 month at first glance. Less and it'd be cheaper to use this, more and it'd be (far) cheaper to use a standard VPS. There are probably even better VPS rates, that's just based on the first one I checked.

The sell of this is the preconfigured web access portal, for which you pay a hefty premium.

It's a VPS with a config OS and RDP.

To emphasise, a £40 month VPS is so astronomically better value if you can config it.