I typed "neato!" into their search bar; they promptly logged off.

I am willing to admit that I pirate windows for the sole purpose of supporting IE with my webapps. It would be too expensive to do it legitimately, so my solution is not for everyone.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/574463/running-internet-e...

And when you finally have them set up, you know what prize you win? You get to debug some crazy-making IE issue. As far as I'm concerned, free isn't enough: they should come with masseuses and bottles of good scotch in compensation.

It is reasonably fast to setup, because once you install XP, you can copy the VM, and install IE 7, copy the VM and install IE 8. I then do the same thing for Vista/Windows 7.

With 8 Gb of ram, I have no problem running 3 Xps, and 2 Windows 7, at the same time.

That's good to know. I'm in the market for a laptop to replace my desktop, and I want enough RAM to run multiple VMs like that. Was thinking I'd need to find one with 12 or 16GB, which rules out MacBooks (unless I get an expensive 3rd party 2x8GB RAM upgrade). But maybe not.

So now I pirate copies of Windows that I have paid for, because it's too much hassle to work with the legitimate versions.

Awesome work, guys! I know first hand how hard it is to maintain a product like this :)

Ok i just discovered that browserstack needs java so it seems they are using a different sw stack

If anything, i would invert the per-person price with the overall price in order to give emphasis to "more people is actually cheaper". There is something in descending prices that makes people feel good.

http://i.imgur.com/XsiTi.png

i know of a service they can use for testing their website in different browsers...

Here's what I'd love next - we'd write a bunch of QUnit javascript tests, put them behind a private url on our staging server, and then be able to run those tests from the command-line on multiple browsers (through BrowserStack, say), and spit back the output in a form that Jenkins understands. I'd certainly pay $20/month for that, and maybe more if it was great.

Looking at their browser list, I could test all Firefox, Opera, and Chrome versions, one version of IE, and the Windows versions of Safari on one Windows 7 box.

I could add to that three VMs for older versions of IE, and a Mac (maybe with a VM) for Mac Safari versions. If the main Win7 machine is also a VM, I could do this all on the Mac.

So, that's a total of 5-6 OS licenses, which would cost $750-$1000.

At $19/month for a single user, BrowserStack becomes more expensive after 2-3 years. At the small team rate of $68/year it becomes more expensive after one year. (I could host VMs on a server and have my testers RDP into it; they can't use the VMs simultaneously but with 4 testers and 5-6 VMs that's not a problem.)

To me, the pricing is right on the edge, which forces me to evaluate the effort of maintaining local VMs and browsers (an invisible cost is most organizations) vs the potential risks of running my in-development software and providing access to my development environments to a third-party over the internet. If the pricing was lower and clearly less expensive than maintaining my own VMs, it'd be a slam-dunk decision and the other factors wouldn't even be considered. (I'm thinking about this from a "how does a developer sell this to corporate management" perspective.)

$70 bucks a month is only real money if you're a broke startup. Otherwise it's peanuts.

I also feel a little weird typing in my test account password into their site.

Edit: The tunnel to my local server doesn't work. I keep getting "There's no server running at port 80".