The surprising attention on sprites, exe.dev, and shellbox — Lalit Maganti

Over the last few weeks, three new products have announced themselves on Hacker News to great success, each making the frontpage:

Sprites (fly.io) with 508 votes and hit #7
exe.dev with 457 votes and hit #2
shellbox.dev with 316 votes and hit #4

All three have a very simple pitch: they will give you full access to Linux virtual machines to act as a sandboxed developer environment in the cloud.

At first glance, the attention these have gotten is very head-scratching. The idea of a Linux VPS has been around for more than 20 years at this point and VPS providers like DigitalOcean and Hetzner are widely known and used in the industry. From a technological standpoint, there’s very little revolutionary here.

Is it price then? Well no: the hardware specs are pretty awful for what you pay. For example, exe.dev gives you 2 CPUs and 8GB RAM shared across your whole account for $20/month. For comparison, at Hetzner for roughly that price, you can get a single VPS with 16 CPUs and 32GB RAM…