Pico.sh – SSH powered services for developers

1 day ago (pico.sh)

Alright, i had plans to use Github (or maybe something Cloudflare ish) but your $2/m has me seriously interested. I'm reviewing now.

I hate when i see fun side projects that cost the same as full subscriptions to other products. There's only a handful of $15/m services i "want" in my life.. it really raises the barrier to entry when i'm so aware and averse to subscription costs.

Yet $2/m? Instantly sold on that price. It's a fun price, it looks like a fun product, it lines up perfectly for me. It's silly that the price has me almost more interested than the product. Love it

Thanks for this, i plan to try it out!

  • Totally feel you on this and kudos to these guys, low pricing makes it so much easier to actually try something without second-guessing. I’m working on a similar philosophy with my own project, 99dev — simple tools for indie devs at just $1/month. Starting with lightweight analytics (like a mini Plausible), but more tools are on the way. No bloat, just useful stuff for folks like us who are building things and watching our budgets.

    Really glad to see more projects like pico.sh embracing low cost, no frills, indie services. https://99.dev

  • You could use GitHub pages + cloudflare for free hosting. My neighbor uses that.

  • $2 is fun for hobbies but hope you are not running in production for your customers with that sort of service level!

    • Thanks for the comment because I think many -- including myself -- resonate with this sentiment. Our pricing strategy was to be competitive with a user just provisioning their own VPS VM with a cloud provider. Our goal is to be competitive on price with a $5/mo VM.

      Further, we are mostly targeting individual/small teams who want to rapidly prototype on the web. We provide enough convenience features (e.g. zero-install, multi-region, site analytics, tunnel connect/disconnect notifications, easy script automation) to entice users to keep their prototypes running in "prod" as long as possible before they feel the need to provision their own VPS.

      We could go upstream and try to target larger teams/companies, but honestly, this is just fun for us to do on the side.

      We don't make any guarantees about uptime at this point but we take it very seriously (we have alerting and respond quickly) and treat it like our day-jobs (I work at a paas and antonio is a platform engineer wizard).

    • For static sites is there that much missing? Throw a good CDN in front of this and would it matter much who the host was?

This thing is really cool, I want to pipe data between systems... can I trust you to have that kind of access?

I stumbled across this clever service when looking for a “pastebin” that handled rendering terminal output with ANSI codes. The irony is that they don’t actually allow that (just plain text can be piped to their pastes service), but I found their whole site and vibe delightful!

And the two authors, qudat, and antoniomima are active on HN, as their responsive comments here demonstrate. Just good work all around.

Co-Founder here, thanks for the interest in our micro-saas powered by SSH.

Happy to answer any questions!

  • Hey, I was just reading your docs, maybe prose.sh will be what I'll use to finally start a blog !

    I noticed this mention here [0]:

        Because in our Go SSH server we re-implement rsync, many options are currently not supported. For example, --delete and --dry-run are not supported.
    

    But on your front page it says :

        Upload your static site to us:
        rsync --delete -rv ./public/ pgs.sh:/mysite/
    
    

    So do you support delete ? One of these pages is outdated or did I miss something ?

    [0] https://pico.sh/file-uploads

  • So I understand I can redirect my custom domain to Pico Pages, Pico Prose, etc. Can I however do the other way around? Can I create somehow a CNAME on my Pico.sh account (such as username-myapp.pgs.sh points to abc.xyz.com)? In essence, I'd like to be able to get a certificate and set a secure https connection to e.g. my Load Balancer my-alb-12345.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com or similar.

  • I remember seeing this a couple of years ago on HN!

    Would you be willing to share how it’s doing on the business side? Hints on how you’ve grown users or how many folks are willing to subscribe?

    I’d love to build a service (in a different domain) that operates as simply as this.

    • > Would you be willing to share how it’s doing on the business side? Hints on how you’ve grown users or how many folks are willing to subscribe?

      Yes, absolutely. Here's our year-end-review where we talk numbers: https://blog.pico.sh/status-011

      Ultimately, what keeps us going is we want these services to exist for our own side-project development and it's an extra boost of motivation when others use our services.

      All of our marketing is through HN/lobsters/reddit since that's our target demo.

  • am I getting this right, that for 2 bucks a month I can publish (okay tun) my dockers and very-unsafe-postgres-with-ssl publicly to selected users?

Very timely for this to come up. Just this morning I was wiring up a personal blog with Obsidian -> Hugo -> Github Pages. I might swap Github Pages out for Pico.sh, it's definitely my kinda service. Well, either that or self-host it.

Love the idea, but I couldn't find a "pricing" page and wanted to abandon reading immediately (I have no time for unsustainable services). Then I learned from the discussion that the pricing is $2/m, which, two things: 1) I still can't find that price on the web site, and 2) it seems unsustainable to me, so I'm still worried.

I run a B2B SaaS. Support costs is what eats you alive: in case of a complex B2B app anything below $40/month is unsustainable. This is of course better for simpler apps/services, but even there you have to be super careful.

  • Thank you for the feedback and we agree so we have changed the header nav link from "pico+" to "pricing".

    In terms of the costs to run a saas, we are actively monitoring hardware utilization and resource allocation. Antonio and I have a lot of experience building and running saas (and paas) products so we feel confident we can manage whatever usage comes our way. We have also been strategic in terms of the services we provide in an effort to keep service support manageable.

  • > I run a B2B SaaS. Support costs is what eats you alive: in case of a complex B2B app anything below $40/month is unsustainable

    I agree to an extent. But it largely depends on the complexity of your offering. If all you do is expose flat data through an API, you can maybe get away with an API Gateway x Lambda x DynamoDB combo, which would cost virtually nothing as the free tier is very generous.

    Just my 2c.

  • $40/month per user, just for support? So for 1000 users, you need to make $40,000 to be sustainable, i.e. like 10 employees?

    • I'm thinking not much support is needed for user's that are willing and able to do all these tasks over SSH. They've pre-filtered for low support load

      Back in early 2000s I ran a shared webhosting business, most customer's were savvy at the time and it was kind of a "you're on your own, let me know if the infra is acting up" type arrangement. I ran it with about 2000 customers for a year or so solo and only got about 2 support emails a day. Back then, 24-72 hour response was acceptable so I never needed to be a 24/7 resource.

    • Yeah I think this why "Book a call" level customers are really subsidising it. Say $10/m/u and you get 200 seats. You pay $2000/m but the bugs you hit are likely uniform so you loaf support like maybe 20 individual users. 20 individual users only bring in 10%. So you need the whales to keep it going.

Pretty unrelated, but if you are a developer and don't have a lifetime SDF.org membership, you should.

  • I had never heard of that. What's your use-case for it?

    • It basically dates back to when having access to a Unix system meant that you needed to be at a university or a big employer or some such. These guys provided one for free.

      Currently you can get some basic email, web hosting, etc. for a one time $1 donation. You can get more for a one time $36 donation.

      They also have internal “forums” and chat and such as well as offering a bunch of related services like VPS, dial up, VPN, a Minecraft server, etc. Realistically, you can get a lot more for a lot less with modern hosts but between nostalgia and the limited environment having a particular kind of charm, it is kinda neat.

  • Why SDF over a free limitless VPS?

    I joined SDF last year and was disappointed. I was willing to tolerate the limitations (eg. can't change your shell unless "validated"; can't even 'touch' a file...) in exchange for community but it's a ghost town. To make matters worse, IRC for new users is only available on a Sunday!

    I would love to give it another shot but I don't understand what its value is in 2025.

Love the KISS approach to your services. Simple text files, built on fundamental services. Honestly also a great way to build SSH (and associated suite) chops for folks just entering Linux/Unix/BSD/*nix world or who only know Windows.

Going to poke at it this week myself. Looks like a healthy competitor to PikaPods for the basic stuff.

Keep up the good work!

I love this! I was about to start using Substack for a personal/professional blog and I was very concerned about the structure they "force" you into. I don't want to socialize in the way they want me to. I just want to write my stuff down, and perhaps help someone, but at the end, all I want is a place to share things with myself in a more elaborated way. Looking at it now!

How interesting! I'm excited by all the energy lately that i've seen around more text-based fun stuff, from Gemini to tilde communities to more TUIs/TUI apps, to this ssh powered set of services! Keep 'em coming!

  • pico.sh is not new by any means. I was using them ~3 years ago (or maybe even for longer), with their lists.sh service.

    After I opened my blog, they launched prose.sh, and rest of the services soon after, but since I settled on my blog, and didn't want to change horses, and they discontinued lists.sh, I had to part ways with them.

    I admire what they've built though, and wish them best of luck.

My company blocks ssh. Is there a way to tunnel this through HTTP?

Love the idea.

There are a couple oddities I found in the UI.

1. When you sign up the prompt says “signup”. I didn’t know what it wanted. I finally just guessed username and that was right.

2. I couldn’t get tokens to create (which they say are highly recommended). I hit c for create, entered a name, press enter. Nothing.

  • Sorry, this is a focus issue with a tui which we'll fix up soon! Should just need to hit <tab> until OK is highlighted and then press enter

This web design is very nice to look at

  • Hey thanks! I stare at our docs site multiple times a day and sometimes I lose all sense of what looks good so your comment is much appreciated.

At risk of scope creep, the greatest selling point Netlify has for me is automatic form email support for static sites. Would be awesome if pico.sh supported that.

  • https://pgs.sh was designed to "compete" with netlify. I'm going to look into this feature and see how it could fit into our service. Thanks so much!

Big fan of pico.sh, been hosting a few small sites on there for a while now, no faster way to get something up and running

> Upload your static site to us

How do you prevent abuse, like illegal material?

  • Good question.

    Right now we run some ML models to check for illegal content and then respond immediately with the ban hammer.

    We also monitor content published on our platform with some admin tools we built.

  • This is the challenge. This is tiny and delightful, but most hosting systems are monsters from a compliance perspective not because of a hunger for bureaucracy but that content moderation is SUPER hard.

    • > content moderation is SUPER hard

      That's a bit over-exaggerated, it certainly isn't fun, nor very interesting, but it's doable, even for smaller organizations. Today is even easier as classification/labeling ML models are pretty good even without any fine-tuning/training on your own dataset.

  • And that's why no one can offer this sustainably for $2/month. There is a cost of policing for illegal stuff as well as outright terrible stuff that requires fair bit of effort.

    • Granted, the market for shared hosting has settled closer to $6, but OVH, Hetzner and Netcup all still offer shared hosting for $2/month, with a free domain on top. And all three are in this market for ages now. They limit you to static pages, PHP and a MySQL database, but you can do plenty of illegal stuff with that.

      2 replies →

This is a really fun project! I've been trying to think of unique ways to allow non-devs to publish blog posts easily on their own websites and this is some great inspiration for it.

I signed up for this awhile back when it was free, it's been hosting bibbidibobbidi.boo ever since. It's very neat.

  • And we're still free! Just added some payments to help keep things running smoothly and allow us to invest in more infrastructure. pgs (static sites) and tuns (tunneling) are both multi-region for example.

I don't seem to be able to add multiple SSH public keys. When I try to create one, I paste my pub key and hit enter and… no key is added.

  • We recently changed our tui framework and the functionality for focus is a bit different. You might have to hit <tab> until `ADD` is highlighted. You can also rsync/scp/sftp an authorized_keys file and we'll add that to your account!

rsync is no SSH tool. I get how that sentence emerged, but it is still a turn off, mixing up terminology like that for convenience.

  • In my experience, any time you're using scp, you'd be better off with rsync.

  • rsync uses ssh for remote communication.

    • I am sure you know this, but rsync works perfectly fine without ssh. In fact, it has its own custom protocol for remote communcation. It can use ssh to talk to remote machines, but so can any tool via the plain pipe mechanism. Followin that logic, every Linux CLI tool that does stdio is an ssh tool...

I have fish shell... took me a little bit to realize that this prevents it to create account, once I created it using bash, it works well. Just FYI.

this is really cool but something I would want to self-host, especially for pastebin.

Sadly the CoC states:

  Don't upload "hate speech" (i.e. demeaning race, gender, age, religious or sexual orientation, etc.)

  Don't upload material that is threatening, harassing, defamatory, or that encourages violence or crime

This can be contorted to mean almost anything. In times such as these where regimes all across the globe are using "hate speech" as carte blanche to snuff out dissent, it's sad to see services follow suite.