IdeaWell

Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

Exe.dev

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

1. Criticism of the vague, uninformative landing page

Many users found the homepage confusing, mistaking it for a game or lacking pricing/docs details.
"Oh I’m going to need more info than this. It’s a service that provides persistent disk and VM’s but doesn’t tell you what those shared resource limits are, what the pricing is..." -reactordev
"That must be worst website ever made. Zero information available on mobile." -sccxy
"The whole UX of this site is garbage and what has fostered so many gripes here." -conductr

2. Enthusiasm for ease of use and quick prototyping

Users praised instant SSH access, persistent disks, sharing, and Shelley AI for rapid development.
"I have played with it and it's so easy get started with that now I want a quick-project idea as an excuse to use it!" -twotwotwo
"I'm not using it yet, but the way that it handles sharing looks incredibly sweet... Just sharing links that people can easily sign into..." -jauntywundrkind
"This is very neat. I will be recommending it to my non-coder friends..." -subdavis

3. Questions on pricing, resources, and VM details

Debate on shared vs. dedicated resources, value vs. VPS, persistence, and tech stack.
"Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain..." -MontyCarloHall
"The docs remark 'VMs share the resources allocated to the user' so I interpret as resources allocated to your account..." -sickcodebruh
"They are VMs, on a crosvm-derived VMM... Yes, KVM." -crawshaw

🚀 Project Ideas

Shared Resource Monitor & Governor

Summary

  • A visual CLI dashboard and background daemon for services that offer "pooled" resources (like exe.dev's 2 CPU/8GB shared among 25 VMs).
  • It provides real-time visibility into which VM or process is "hogging" the shared account-level allocation and allows for setting soft/hard limits across disparate VM instances.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Power users of exe.dev or shared VPS plans
Core Feature Cross-VM resource aggregation and throttling
Tech Stack Go (for CLI), eBPF (for resource tracking)
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • solves the primary confusion point: "Your VMs share CPU/RAM. Create as many VMs as you like with the resources you have."
  • HN users expressed frustration over not knowing what happens under load: "Are plan CPUs pinned/reserved... or time-shared with other customers under load, and what contention should I expect?"

Tailscale-First VM Cloner

Summary

  • A "Pre-baked" image management tool specifically designed for exe.dev that automatically integrates Tailscale at boot for a seamless "Global Mesh" experience.
  • It solves the manual overhead of networking multiple isolated VMs together by ensuring every "cloned" instance joins the user's Tailnet with zero-config.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Homelab enthusiasts and distributed systems devs
Core Feature Auto-provisioning Tailscale auth keys into VM clones
Tech Stack Python/Shell scripts, Tailscale API, exe.dev CLI
Difficulty Low
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • Directly addresses a core user request: "Would love it if Tailscale came pre-installed! Or even better: some simple way to make it so every VM I start up is automatically/easily part of my Tailnet."
  • Leverages the co-founders' background as Tailscale creators to build a "fan-favorite" utility.

Shelley "Vibe-Code" Previewer & Exposer

Summary

  • A local proxy and tunnel management service that detects when a coding agent (like Shelley) is spinning up a web server and provides an instant "Public/Private" toggle with authenticated access links.
  • It streamlines the "Vibe-coding" to "Live-hosting" pipeline by automating the share set-public commands and managing Discord-style invite links.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience AI-assisted "Vibe Coders" and non-coder hobbyists
Core Feature Automatic web-server detection and sharing UI
Tech Stack Node.js, exe.dev SDK/CLI
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue-ready: $5/mo for "Pro" sharing features

Notes

  • Targets the "magic" experience HN users loved: "Vibe coded something running on port 8000... I imagine quite a few technically impressive things happening under the hood."
  • Simplifies the sharing mechanism which users found powerful but slightly obscure: "You can share your web server as easily as you can share a Google Doc... this fills a huge gap."

Read Later