Good ideas, and I agree with you about the market possibilities, and trust advantage of open-source, but the "manual deploy" is not actually how it works regarding paid deployments.
The open-source version is just the browser software, enough for a single person to run a single instance, but the pro "closed source" version includes a bunch of extra control software for running as many instances as will fit on a machine, in a scalable, secure and resource-safe way, as well as souped-up features like co-browsing, better viewport streaming, and built-in secure document viewing.
The open-source version actually comes with a docker image [1], but for the paid deployments I haven't seen the need for k8s. That might be because I don't understand k8s, but I just haven't seen the advantage over the way I'm currently doing it. And no-one has asked for k8s, either.
But I think what you were trying to tell me was a good way to set up a SaaS version of this. And I admit I've struggled with that in the past. I think infrastructure has been a part of this failure, but even when I've had workable SaaS offerings, I think my marketing, pricing, design and the "trust factor" -- of doing your browsing in a 3rd-party in a new category (RBI vs, say, a VPN), and also of doing so with a tiny company -- were the big things.
as to:
> you can then monitor the usage and issue a bill with payment provider like Stripe
> generally, i’d recommend having a limited free tier, but if not possible a free trial
> for paying customers, you could charge per second spent in the browser window, instead of seats
> the reasoning for it, is some customers would cause more traffic than others and traffic is not inexpensive, therefor you should make a pricing model, which is linear with traffic
I really like your very solid sounding ideas for a SaaS setup tho. Thank you very much!
The open-source version is just the browser software, enough for a single person to run a single instance, but the pro "closed source" version includes a bunch of extra control software for running as many instances as will fit on a machine, in a scalable, secure and resource-safe way, as well as souped-up features like co-browsing, better viewport streaming, and built-in secure document viewing.
The open-source version actually comes with a docker image [1], but for the paid deployments I haven't seen the need for k8s. That might be because I don't understand k8s, but I just haven't seen the advantage over the way I'm currently doing it. And no-one has asked for k8s, either.
But I think what you were trying to tell me was a good way to set up a SaaS version of this. And I admit I've struggled with that in the past. I think infrastructure has been a part of this failure, but even when I've had workable SaaS offerings, I think my marketing, pricing, design and the "trust factor" -- of doing your browsing in a 3rd-party in a new category (RBI vs, say, a VPN), and also of doing so with a tiny company -- were the big things.
as to:
> you can then monitor the usage and issue a bill with payment provider like Stripe
> generally, i’d recommend having a limited free tier, but if not possible a free trial
> for paying customers, you could charge per second spent in the browser window, instead of seats
> the reasoning for it, is some customers would cause more traffic than others and traffic is not inexpensive, therefor you should make a pricing model, which is linear with traffic
I really like your very solid sounding ideas for a SaaS setup tho. Thank you very much!
[1]: https://hub.docker.com/r/dosyago/browsergapce