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Comment by nithayakumar | Hacker News Reader

Nish here. Let me address the run time and pricing question - my cofounder wants to touch on the other question.

Teams have told us that they want to avoid 24/7 machines. It gets really expensive (and wastes energy) when people keep creating instances and leave them on. Our approach is to let people keep them on 24/7 if they want, but we want them to stop the instances too (we have automation for this).

That said, the way we’ve set up our environments is that the machine doesnt “turn off” - we just stop it. So its like closing your macbook lid and reopening it. You don’t lose your progress and youre not charged for the time in between.

And Replit’s Hacker plan is cheap but they aren’t very powerful (just 2vCPU and 2GB ram)

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>And Replit’s Hacker plan is cheap but they aren’t very powerful (just 2vCPU and 2GB ram)

with all due respect, ur equivalent plans are far more expensive. because the equivalent on Nimbus is 30 hours per week. But on replit - u can actually host a website. The repl is "always on".

I think we probably have to agree to disagree on wasting energy here. The magic of cloud environments is always on environments where my scratch api is also running for my other developer to ping. Replit is pretty good for this. So is Sagemaker. But I do respect that ur target market is a bit different.

> The magic of cloud environments is always on environments where my scratch api is also running for my other developer to ping.

The magic of cloud environments is efficiency and economies of scale. Scale to 0 services are perhaps some of the most popular in the cloud era; especially for students or side projects which seem to be the inspiration for Nimbus.

I’m not defending any pricing but I think the model is useful.

Yeah - the targets are different. Thats probably why comparing the pricing seems odd too. Even our lowest tier has more dedicated memory (so its more expensive for us too). But don't get me wrong - I think Replit is really cool but just not what we're going for :)

every virtualisation product for 20 years has supported saving the machine state to a file and then restoring it at some point later (maybe years)

I do this a lot on my home machine, with an nvme ssd it's under a second to save or restore the entire machine state

it's a shame the big cloud providers (Azure, GCP, AWS) virtualisation offerings are so... crappy compared to VMware workstation/ESXi/Xen/KVM/... from 20 years ago

Gcp supports it: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/suspend-resu...

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