IdeaWell

Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

I am building a cloud

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

1. Cloud pricing is market‑driven, not cost‑driven "The price is what the customer will pay, regardless of your costs." – jeffrallen
"Cloud vendor pricing often isn’t based on cost." – fragmede
"Traditional Cloud 1.0 companies sell you a VM with a default of 3000 IOPS, while your laptop has 500k." – stingraycharles

2. Simpler, cheap bare‑metal / VPS solutions beat over‑engineered clouds
"I love Hetzner so much… they just do everything right." – yard2010
"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 limits." – szszrk "You can SSH to a bare‑metal server and just tell Claude to set up Postgres." – skybrian

3. New “better‑cloud” services (e.g., exe.dev) promise flat‑rate VMs but raise adoption questions
"One price, no surprises. You get 2 CPUs, 8 GB of RAM, and 25 GB of disk—shared across up to 25 VMs." – szszrk
"Their first location (PDX) is on Amazon… it’s much more expensive for them than the others." – skybrian
"It looks like exe.dev is a cool service that I enjoyed." – awhitty

🚀 Project Ideas

[Resource‑Based Cloud (RBC)]

Summary

  • Bill only for the compute, memory, and I/O you actually consume, not for reserved VM slots.
  • Automatic burst‑capacity sharing across users in the same region, eliminating over‑provisioning costs.
  • Simple CLI/API to spin up, resize, or terminate “resource buckets” with real‑time usage dashboards.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Developers and small teams tired of per‑VM pricing and unpredictable egress fees (e.g., stingraycharles, sroussey).
Core Feature Pay‑per‑resource model with transparent, usage‑based billing and auto‑scaling within shared pools.
Tech Stack Firecracker micro‑VMs, Prometheus + Grafana for metrics, Rust backend, Go CLI, PostgreSQL for billing.
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue-ready: Tiered subscription (Starter $5/mo, Pro $20/mo, Enterprise custom) + optional “burst credits” add‑on.

Notes

  • HN commenters repeatedly cite “the price is what the customer will pay, regardless of your costs” and frustration with “10x what you pay racking a server” (faangguyindia, pjc50). RBC flips the model to actual usage, directly addressing that pain.
  • The “shared across up to 25 VMs” idea (sroussey) can be formalized as a true resource pool, giving users the flexibility they desire without complex pricing tiers.

[AgentOps Cloud]

Summary

  • Fully managed environment for running persistent LLM agents and background workloads.
  • Built‑in Tailscale networking, automatic snapshot/restore, and cheap persistent block storage.
  • Simple SSH‑plus‑CLI onboarding; no need for manual VM provisioning or Kubernetes.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Engineers building AI agents (e.g., skybrian, zackify) who want a cheap, reliable host that “keeps running when I close my laptop”.
Core Feature One‑click agent deployment with integrated networking, snapshot‑based state persistence, and per‑GB egress pricing.
Tech Stack Docker + Firecracker, Tailscale SDK, Redis for state sharing, Terraform for infra, PostgreSQL for billing.
Difficulty Low
Monetization Revenue-ready: Pay‑as‑you‑go $0.02/GB RAM‑hour + $0.01/GB storage + $0.05/GB egress.

Notes

  • Multiple HN users (e.g., skybrian, sixhobbits) want a platform where “agents can keep running” and “easier to spin up VMs without complex infra”. AgentOps Cloud delivers that with a focus on agent‑centric workflows and cheap persistent storage, resonating with the “personal isolated projects” crowd.
  • The lack of clear egress pricing in current offerings (stingraycharles) is directly tackled by transparent $0.05/GB rates.

[EU‑Sovereign Edge Compute Co‑op]

Summary

  • Low‑cost, EU‑based compute nodes offering sovereign‑grade compliance and predictable pricing.
  • Resource‑based billing with negligible egress costs, targeting users wary of US jurisdiction (qxmat).
  • Community‑driven node pool, shared across members, with transparent SLAs and data‑ residency guarantees.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience EU startups, regulated businesses, and privacy‑concerned developers (qxmat, hitherward).
Core Feature Sovereign‑grade VMs in EU data centers, billed only for actual compute/RAM/IO; egress priced at $0.01/GB; no hidden fees.
Tech Stack ARM64 KVMI, Cilium for networking, OpenTelemetry for monitoring, Rust billing engine, NixOS for reproducibility.
Difficulty High
Monetization Revenue-ready: Flat “Co‑op Credit” subscription $10/mo per member + pay‑per‑use overages.

Notes- HN participants (e.g., qxmat) explicitly ask for “EU sovereign clouds” to avoid US jurisdiction and CLOUD Act concerns. This project offers a community‑controlled alternative with transparent pricing, directly addressing that unmet need.

  • The emphasis on “cost of egress” being “10x cheaper” (stingraycharles) is mitigated by ultra‑low egress rates, making the service attractive for bandwidth‑heavy workloads.

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