
Vagon – Personal high performance computer in the cloud - hasancanyasar
https://vagon.io
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Nullabillity
Wow, mixing monthly and hourly pricing like that is borderline fraud.
Especially when you advertise it as a $8/mo service when the actual price for
a typical 160h work month is $215. For the cheapest option. That's 26x the
advertised price! At that point, buying an equivalent computer yourself would
break even in months. And it'd work without a stable internet connection!

Here in Sweden all taxis advertise the component prices, but the the most
prominent price has to be the "Jämförpris" (comparison price), which is the
price of a standardized "typical" journey.

And of course this has to use Intercom, in an even more invasive and annoying
configuration than usual.

I suppose my only solace is that people have tried this idea before[0], and at
least they seem to be well on their way to bankruptcy.

[0]: [https://www.wycore.com/](https://www.wycore.com/)

~~~
Arctic_
I think you're looking at it wrong. The price for the base service (so storing
your settings/app configuration) is $8 /mo while the usage itself is added to
that. The pricing to me is pretty straightforward.

On a side note, do you really take solace in watching businesses go to
bankruptcy? Why though?

~~~
gfodor
When someone says "Starting at $8/mo" that usually means you can start getting
something of value at $8/mo. In this case, that's false.

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Animats
There are other services like this, mostly for gamers. Vagon is $1.29/hour,
plus $8/month. There's no technical problem doing this, but it's an expensive
service to provide. The pricing is usually too high to get a market. NVidia's
GEForce Now and Google's Stadia are running at a loss for promotional reasons.
The game industry's reaction to Stadia is that almost everybody who considered
supporting it expects Google will cancel that service.

Is Vagon reselling AWS, or do they have their own data center?

~~~
hasancanyasar
Yes, we built vagon on top of AWS with goal of eventually supporting multiple
cloud providers. Our thinking is there's already a reliable, state of the art
network of datacenters around the globe for our consumption, it makes sense to
use it.

~~~
BubRoss
It might make sense to use it, but why does it make sense to resell it? What
are you adding to the equation and who is going to pay 1.29 an hour?

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aroch
At work, we use Paperspace quite a bit for Desktop-as-a-Service in order to
teach distance learning and in-person classes. We like not having to rely on
our users having beefy(ish) laptops or being able to install software on them.
The killer paperspace features for us, in no particular order, are:

1\. Private networks -> keep classes isolated 2\. Shared drives -> mount read-
only class data 3\. Create machine images -> build out the 'base' class image
and spawn new instances from it 4\. An API for spinning up and down

It seems like you are positioning yourselves as more for individuals and less
for companies. It's not clear fo me from the landing page, but does Vagon
require you download and install a client? Or is there a browser-only option?
If we were to spin up, say 35 VMs, and then destroyed them a week later, is
that $7.99/month charged for each machine or just once? Is it pro-rated if you
don't use the whole month?

~~~
nizmow
How do you remote into Paperspace instances? Is there a custom client that
performs well? Every few months I'll tinker with setting up a Linux desktop in
some generic cloud provider, but the lack of good remote desktop X solutions
is always a pain point.

EDIT: after some more clicking around I managed to find references to a
Paperspace "native app" for remote desktop. I may sign up for an account and
give it a try, since I just noticed Vagon only supports Windows machines at
the moment.

~~~
aroch
We generally use the browser interface, since many of our classes have both a
GUI app and commandline work -- we've done this with both the Windows VMs and
the linux ones. For linux desktop (Ubuntu), we use the ML-in-a-box image as
our base and build on top of that. The linux VMs you can also SSH in via your
favorite terminal/client

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capableweb
Just wanted to mention that changing the tab name to "Steve says..." and back
to your normal attention, just because the tab is in the background, feels
like a terrible way of getting my attention. It's mostly annoying but then
when I go to the tab, there is no Steve saying anything! Would expect
something happened. But then putting the tab in the background shows the
switching of tab name again. Not very nice UX.

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mcstafford
Seems like a wrapper for, and should be compared with
[https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/)

~~~
hasancanyasar
It may seem that way but I assure you it's not. You can tell by comparing our
prices to workspaces and see that we're more affordable. When we started to
work on vagon we did consider using Workspaces under the hood but opted to
develop our own infrastructure on top of EC2 and our own display protocol
instead of using Teradici PCoIP like Workspaces.

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ornel
Nice interface and very easy to set up, it's great I could get to try it
without entering any payment methods.

I actually need a Linux machine (for GIS with QGIS), it would be nice to get
other OS options aside from Windows. I also wanted to sync my Dropbox folders
but stopped short of typing my password in the VM after installing the Dropbox
client, as I have no idea what kind of security you are using.

Something else, I had it in fullscreen mode on Firefox, but then every time I
went back to my guest OS it triggered a resize of the guest, which was kind of
annoying. Maybe it would be good to choose whether I want a scaled view.

~~~
hasancanyasar
We do have rolling out Linux machines in our roadmap, hopefully quite soon.

Thanks for the feedback about fullscreen mode I agree it is annoying. We
haven't yet figured out a simple way to communicate that choice but it's
absolutely necessary.

Regarding security: This is obviously a question we get a lot. We're providing
you with an isolated VM, it's not a shared resource. Only you have access to
it. We are basically managing backups for your data as file system volumes. We
don't have any further access to it. Dropbox was pre-installed for convenience
but I see how that may be suspicious.

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hasancanyasar
Hey HN!

vagon is a personal cloud-computer that is built to help creatives with
flexible performance. Architects, CAD designers, video editors, animators,
researchers - they all need powerful computers to create things and that’s
what we are trying to provide. Our goal is to make running graphics software
such as Adobe or Autodesk products possible even from a Chromebook or a
veteran Macbook Air.

After a lot of hard work, we've finally launched our beta. We’d love to hear
your feedback and recommendations to make it better!

Through our web app, you can \- create your personal vagon computer, \-
install your software, \- sync your files, and use it as you use any other
computer.

You can access your vagon anywhere - you only need a stable connection and a
computer to use it.

P.S: We are currently on Product Hunt, you can visit our post and get a 2
months free coupon code to get you started right away.

~~~
KerryJones
Just a thought -- chromebooks are often being used in school setting as a
cheap alternative to having an expensive Macbook Pro or something equivalent.

A student discount could go a long way.

~~~
hasancanyasar
We're working on it right now :) we plan to announce it in the coming weeks.
Glad to see it makes sense to other people as well.

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cultus
This name really isn't the greatest.

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chickenpotpie
Why are the specs not more configurable? You could offer it at a lot lower of
a price if a costumer can get 16 GB of GPU without 244 GB of RAM.

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paultopia
So, like, AWS + remote desktop?

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wulfricin
I think the idea is it comes pre-prepared for people who cannot spawn an
environment from scratch on AWS or any other cloud provider for their purpose

~~~
chickenpotpie
To be fair AWS does offer that
[https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3](https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3).
But, Vagon is somehow cheaper than AWS, which I almost never see.

~~~
wulfricin
As a non dev-opsy person, I do not think i can create an environment to use.
To be fair though, I cannot understand amazon pricing compared to vagon's
enough to have an opinion eitherway

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chickenpotpie
Note: I have not used this service before.

I'm pretty sure this is an almost exact competitor to Vagon. You're not
creating an environment. It's a full desktop right out of the box.

