Potentially useful context: OP is one of the cofounders of Tailscale.
> Traditional Cloud 1.0 companies sell you a VM with a default of 3000 IOPS, while your laptop has 500k. Getting the defaults right (and the cost of those defaults right) requires careful thinking through the stack.
I wish them a lot of luck! I admire the vision and am definitely a target customer, I'm just afraid this goes the way things always go: start with great ideals, but as success grows, so must profit.
Cloud vendor pricing often isn't based on cost. Some services they lose money on, others they profit heavily from. These things are often carefully chosen: the type of costs that only go up when customers are heavily committed—bandwidth, NAT gateway, etc.
Nice post. exe.dev is a cool service that I enjoyed.
I agree there is opportunity in making LLM development flows smooth, paired with the flexibility of root-on-a-Linux-machine.
> Time and again I have said “this is the one” only to be betrayed by some half-assed, half-implemented, or half-thought-through abstraction. No thank you.
The irony is that this is my experience of Tailscale.
Finally, networking made easy. Oh god, why is my battery doing so poorly. Oh god, it's modified my firewall rules in a way that's incompatible with some other tool, and the bug tracker is silent. Now I have to understand their implementation, oh dear.
Everything which cloud companies provide just cost so much, my own postgres running with HA setup and backup cost me 1/10th the price of RDS or CloudSQL service running in production over 10 years with no downtime.
i directly autoscales instances off of the Metrics harvested from graphana it works fine for us, we've autoscaler configured via webhooks. Very simple and never failed us.
i don't know why would i even ever use GCP or AWS anymore.
All my services are fully HA and backup works like charm everyday.
Companies buy cloud services because they want to reduce in-house server management and operations, for them it's a trade-off with hiring the right people. But you are right, when you can find the right people doing it yourself can be a lot cheaper.
Especially these days you can SSH to a baremetal server and just tell Claude to set up Postgres. Job done. You don't need autoscaling because you can afford a server that's 5X faster from the start.
Agree, I used to always use Heroku or Render style platforms for my own software, but nowadays I just have a Linux server with Docker Compose and a Cron job. The cron job every minute runs docker pull (downloads latest image) and docker up -d (switches to new version only if there is a new version). And put caddy in front for the HTTPS. This has been very cheap and reliable for years now.
Honestly I like Hetzner a lot but lately it has been very unstable for us. https://status.hetzner.com/ this page always has couple of incidents happening at the same time. I really appreciate the services they provide but i wish they were more stable.
Just shows I'm the Dropbox commentator. I have what exe provides on my own and am shocked by the value these abstractions provide everyone else!! One off containers on my own hardware spin up spin down run async agents, etc, tailscale auth, team can share or connect easily by name.
With LLMs there is no real dev velocity penalty of using high perf. langs like say Rust. A pair of 192 Core AMD EPYC boxes will have enough headroom for 99.9% of projects.
The "one price" is oddly small for a cloud company. I'm sure it's nice and fast but the $20/mo seems smaller than some companies' free tiers, especially for disk.
The main reason clouds offer network block devices is abstraction.
Hahaha! Have fun! I‘m doing the same - together with Claude Code. Since August. With https (mTLS1.3) everywhere, because i can. Just my money, just my servers, just for me. Just for fun. And what a fun it is!
Me too. I already moved our products to it and it is getting fairly robust. Guess many smaller companies got tired with the big guys asking a lot of money for things that should be cheap.
Article doesn’t really tell what fundamental problems will be solved, except fancy VM allocation. Nothing about hardware, networking, reliability, tooling and such. Well, nice, good luck.
As I understand, a cloud provider where instead of paying for each VM (with a set of resources), you pay for the resources, and can get as many VMs as you can fit on these resources.
Why is an imperative SSH interface a better way of setting cloud resources than something like OpenTofu? In my experience humans and agents work better in declarative environments. If an OpenTofu integration is offered in the future, will exe.dev offer any value over existing cost-effective VPS providers like Hetzner? Technically, Hetzner, for example, also allows you to set up shared disk volumes:
I don't think SSH vs OpenTofu is the core issue here.
For agents, declarative plans are still valuable because they are reviewable. The interesting question is whether exe.dev changes the primitive: resource pools for many isolated VM-like processes, or just nicer VPS provisioning.
I welcome the initiative but it’s pretty costly compared to the bare metal cloud providers. So the value as to be the platform as service too.
Potentially useful context: OP is one of the cofounders of Tailscale.
> Traditional Cloud 1.0 companies sell you a VM with a default of 3000 IOPS, while your laptop has 500k. Getting the defaults right (and the cost of those defaults right) requires careful thinking through the stack.
I wish them a lot of luck! I admire the vision and am definitely a target customer, I'm just afraid this goes the way things always go: start with great ideals, but as success grows, so must profit.
Cloud vendor pricing often isn't based on cost. Some services they lose money on, others they profit heavily from. These things are often carefully chosen: the type of costs that only go up when customers are heavily committed—bandwidth, NAT gateway, etc.
But I'm fairly certain OP knows this.
Many cloud vendors have you pay through the nose for IOPS and bandwidth.
Edit: I posted this before reading, and these two are the same he points out.
Nice post. exe.dev is a cool service that I enjoyed.
I agree there is opportunity in making LLM development flows smooth, paired with the flexibility of root-on-a-Linux-machine.
> Time and again I have said “this is the one” only to be betrayed by some half-assed, half-implemented, or half-thought-through abstraction. No thank you.
The irony is that this is my experience of Tailscale.
Finally, networking made easy. Oh god, why is my battery doing so poorly. Oh god, it's modified my firewall rules in a way that's incompatible with some other tool, and the bug tracker is silent. Now I have to understand their implementation, oh dear.
No thank you.
i just use Hetzner.
Everything which cloud companies provide just cost so much, my own postgres running with HA setup and backup cost me 1/10th the price of RDS or CloudSQL service running in production over 10 years with no downtime.
i directly autoscales instances off of the Metrics harvested from graphana it works fine for us, we've autoscaler configured via webhooks. Very simple and never failed us.
i don't know why would i even ever use GCP or AWS anymore.
All my services are fully HA and backup works like charm everyday.
Companies buy cloud services because they want to reduce in-house server management and operations, for them it's a trade-off with hiring the right people. But you are right, when you can find the right people doing it yourself can be a lot cheaper.
Right... That's why the hire "AWS Certified specialist ninja"
I get the feeling that with LLMs in the mix, in-house server management can do a lot more than it used to.
Perhaps it saves some time looking through the docs, but do you really trust an LLM to do the actual work?
Yes and an LLM checks it as well. I am yet to find a sysadmin task that an LLM couldn't solve neatly.
Especially these days you can SSH to a baremetal server and just tell Claude to set up Postgres. Job done. You don't need autoscaling because you can afford a server that's 5X faster from the start.
You just use docker.
It is like 4 lines of config for Postgres, the only line you need to change is on which path Postgres should store the data.
Agree, I used to always use Heroku or Render style platforms for my own software, but nowadays I just have a Linux server with Docker Compose and a Cron job. The cron job every minute runs docker pull (downloads latest image) and docker up -d (switches to new version only if there is a new version). And put caddy in front for the HTTPS. This has been very cheap and reliable for years now.
What images are you running that you'd need the latest version up after just a minute?
Honestly I like Hetzner a lot but lately it has been very unstable for us. https://status.hetzner.com/ this page always has couple of incidents happening at the same time. I really appreciate the services they provide but i wish they were more stable.
> The standard price for a GB of egress from a cloud provider is 10x what you pay racking a server in a normal data center.
Oh, that’s too kind. More like 100x to 1000x. Raw bandwidth is cheap.
That's insane funding so congrats.
Just shows I'm the Dropbox commentator. I have what exe provides on my own and am shocked by the value these abstractions provide everyone else!! One off containers on my own hardware spin up spin down run async agents, etc, tailscale auth, team can share or connect easily by name.
Investment is done by relationships, belief in a future vision and team, and growth metrics like number of paying customers.
The technology itself in its current form is not valuable
With LLMs there is no real dev velocity penalty of using high perf. langs like say Rust. A pair of 192 Core AMD EPYC boxes will have enough headroom for 99.9% of projects.
The "one price" is oddly small for a cloud company. I'm sure it's nice and fast but the $20/mo seems smaller than some companies' free tiers, especially for disk.
The main reason clouds offer network block devices is abstraction.
Hahaha! Have fun! I‘m doing the same - together with Claude Code. Since August. With https (mTLS1.3) everywhere, because i can. Just my money, just my servers, just for me. Just for fun. And what a fun it is!
Me too. I already moved our products to it and it is getting fairly robust. Guess many smaller companies got tired with the big guys asking a lot of money for things that should be cheap.
Yeah i feel like it's getting cloudy
You can run several VM's or containers with isolation on your phone hardware, why even use the cloud when you just want to show your friends?
exe.dev. 111 IN A 52.35.87.134
52.35.87.134 <- Amazon Technologies Inc. (AT-88-Z)
"I am white labeling a cloud"
FTA “Hence the Series A: we have some computers to buy.”
Article doesn’t really tell what fundamental problems will be solved, except fancy VM allocation. Nothing about hardware, networking, reliability, tooling and such. Well, nice, good luck.
I don't get it, what is this, how is it different?
As I understand, a cloud provider where instead of paying for each VM (with a set of resources), you pay for the resources, and can get as many VMs as you can fit on these resources.
Why is an imperative SSH interface a better way of setting cloud resources than something like OpenTofu? In my experience humans and agents work better in declarative environments. If an OpenTofu integration is offered in the future, will exe.dev offer any value over existing cost-effective VPS providers like Hetzner? Technically, Hetzner, for example, also allows you to set up shared disk volumes:
https://github.com/hetzneronline/community-content/blob/mast...
It also has a CLI, hcloud. Am I getting any value with exe.dev I couldn't get with an 80 line hcloud wrapper?
I don't think SSH vs OpenTofu is the core issue here.
For agents, declarative plans are still valuable because they are reviewable. The interesting question is whether exe.dev changes the primitive: resource pools for many isolated VM-like processes, or just nicer VPS provisioning.
It doesn't do either at competitive rates by the looks of it.
How difficult is it to build a second startup on the side?
I know its a personal blog but the writing style is really full of himself. What a martyr, starting a second company.
It's hard to see the scale of what he's doing. Could be:
- I'm building a server farm in my homelab.
- I'm doing a small startup to see if this idea works.
- We're taking on AWS by being more cost effective. Funding secured.
> 100 GB data transfer+
> $20 a month
2025 or 2005, what's the difference?