I believe this kind of service is the way forward when it comes to developer tooling.
But paying $39/mo/user for having the right to deal with the deployment myself for a tool that is still alpha is pretty high.
I understand the (tremendous) value prop, but that's the kind of price I'd be expecting from a SaaS version, not from a self-hosted app. Although not giving a discount for self-hosting and a price per user is the "modern" way to do open source (see gitlab or mattermost), it still feels a bit wrong.
Anyway, excuse my old man rant, awesome work and good luck making a business out of it! I'll give it a try.
For me it's a different issue. To me, Developer Tools are very personal, and I've come to view using non-free IDEs as a waste of time in the long-run. If I'm going to set it up for myself individually, I want the whole thing to be open source*.
It was this philosophy that kept me away from JetBrains IDE's for years. Eventually, someone talked me into giving it a try and there was no going back for me! Basically ALL the other software I run, from the OS on up, is FLOSS, but I happily pay to run WebStorm for my JS/TS development! The value provided to me is light-years ahead of the Eclipse/VSCode flavor of the month.
I remain a firm proponent of FLOSS, but I am also realistic about the value of truly great proprietary software!
> I remain a firm proponent of FLOSS, but I am also realistic about the value of truly great proprietary software!
This mirrors my own experience with JetBrains products, in particular with their Java IDE in large enterprise projects (4000+ source files). NetBeans kept freezing when I tried to use code search, whereas Eclipse seemed to randomly crash. I also recall the data source and MyBatis XML integration (with plugins) being better in IntelliJ IDEA as well - even though the startup indexing is slow and I also needed to increase the max memory for the IDE, same as with others (a few GB per instance). Aside from that I might just like the NetBeans UI a bit better but the language support isn't there.
This was a few years ago, but JetBrains still seems to have great code completion, tools to explore the codebase (dependency graphs, ER diagrams for DBs), as well as support for most of the popular stacks out there, which is why I use their Ultimate tools package with everything. Only Fleet was buggy when compared with VSC, but it was tech preview when I tried it. Oh and the PyCharm experience with Python and venv was a bit off when there were build errors (they weren't displayed prominently when you used the context option to install dependencies), but Python in general seems to have issues on Windows sometimes with compiling drivers or whatever.
Edit: oh wait WebStorm had issues with refactoring in a few thousand line long AngularJS controllers in one legacy project.
To me it feels like software like that should be free, but sadly that's not the world we live in. I personally lucked out with their student offering, graduation discount and recurring discounts. For smaller projects I still do some editing in VSC, not a Vim/Emacs user personally. Cloud based dev tools seem... interesting?
Calling VSCode a flavour of the month seems a bit harsh. It’s old enough to be well into elementary school, and it seems at such low risk of being dethroned that it’s probably going to play a big part in Microsoft’s re-attempt at world domination.
Ah that is poor wording on my part! By "flavor of the month", I was referring to the many VS Code variants (e.g. VSCodium, GitHub Codespaces, etc). For better or worse VS Code has become the Chrome of the IDE world with a staggering market share!
Heck nah. After using it for a while I realized I didn't like it too much, so I switched. The 5% of the time when I wanted to use it take advantage of the muscle memory I developed while migrating to the other IDE (at the time, MacVim), I couldn't, unless I wanted to pay or keep an old version around...
If you're saying that you've got muscle memory for JetBrains keyboard shortcuts and you want them elsewhere, most IDEs let you configure them. There is a JetBrains-style keymap for VSCode, for example.
Thanks! The pricing is there mostly to set expectations for the future. The current release works (for the most part) for individual users and it would not support a team well. Hocus is free for up to 3 users, so we expect people who deploy the alpha version not to pay a thing.
Hocus is more cost-efficient when you need larger instances. If you need 8 CPU cores ($0.72/hour on Codespaces) and a single dev uses their IDE for 4 hours a day on average, Codespaces itself would come out to about $0.72 * 4 * 5 * 4 * 30 = $1728 a month. But that gives me the idea that maybe we should introduce cheaper pricing plans but with limits on VM resources - pay less if you have lower compute requirements.
Maybe I'm confused here, but wouldn't I still be paying instance costs on top of your per-seat license?
256 cores would be about $2.50 to $5/hr in AWS depending on reservations and how much you're able to oversubscribe. That's another $1,500 to $3,000/mo on top of your $1,170/mo.
If you're paying for the compute then cool, that's a good price. If this is self-hosted though then I can't really see why I would bother unless I had no choice but to self host and cobbling together a simpler if less ideal solution isn't allowed.
I believe it's a step backwards. If I cannot open your project locally in my favorite IDE, then you are handcuffed to a specific vendor... and that will hurt you in the long run.
Anyway, excuse my old man rant, awesome work and good luck making a business out of it! I'll give it a try.