Pico.sh – SSH powered services for developers

https://pico.sh/

by TheTaytay • 1 year ago

635 141 1 year ago

pico.sh

mrbluecoat• 1 year ago

Upload your static site to us

How do you prevent abuse, like illegal material?

jkingsman• 1 year ago

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.

shishcat2• 1 year ago

you can easily find entire VMs for 2€/month on sites like LES

kupopuffs• 1 year ago

people assuming that LE are going after smalltime hosting

diggan2• 1 year ago

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.

Helithumper• 1 year ago

Could be useful to have a tool similar to https://git.0x0.st/mia/0x0#moderation-ui

aitchnyu• 1 year ago

Tangential, how heavy is a NSFW classifier for a VPS? This link leads to a HuggingFace model with Telegram id of author offering premium model.

Andoryuuta• 1 year ago

I'm not sure why it would be different from any other hosting provider. They do clarify what they consider abuse / forbidden content, and their operational policies though:

[1] https://pico.sh/abuse

[2] https://pico.sh/ops#code-of-content-publication

ashishb2• 1 year ago

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.

wongarsu3• 1 year ago

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.

rendx• 1 year ago

You can even get full 'root' on a virtual machine for that price, and plenty of webhosting options.

https://lowendbox.com/blog/2-usd-vps-cheap-vps-under-2-month...

For many years now I've been hosting my IRC bouncer on a $13/yr VPS at netcup and it has been more stable than some of my other VPSes.

qudat13• 1 year ago

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.

amelius• 1 year ago

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

chasil• 1 year ago

I have heard that SSH could be tunneled over DNS UDP packets.

This looks like a decent article, will read later.

https://medium.com/@rogergalo/learn-how-easy-is-to-bypass-fi...

palata4• 1 year ago

Not sure if it has to go that far. Probably it's just blocking port 22.

palata4• 1 year ago

I agree. Something like what GitHub offers? https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/troubleshooting-ss...

johnklos• 1 year ago

Stupid company!

I keep a machine which has sshd listening on the IMAPS port (993) for when I'm traveling. It's amazing how many free networks don't allow ssh, but with -J and sshd on port 993, that really doesn't matter.

lormayna• 1 year ago

A NGFW, frequently used in the enterprise environments will block it. They are checking the package signatures, not only the YCP ports.

cuanim• 1 year ago

Cockscrew might fit your usecase[1]

[1] https://github.com/bryanpkc/corkscrew

prmoustache• 1 year ago

Use that from home or a mobile phone connection?

You probably aren't supposed to update your personal website and stuff when you are working for your company anyway.

mbs159• 1 year ago

Are you sure that they are blocking SSH packets, or just port 22? If they are blocking the port, it's good practice to use something other than 22 anyways

unshavedyak4• 1 year ago

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!

unshavedyak4• 1 year ago

Bandwidth limitations has me chuckling though: https://pico.sh/faq#are-there-any-bandwidth-limitations

Any thoughts on how the review will happen when that barrier is reached?

wongarsu3• 1 year ago

Traffic isn't actually that expensive outside of big clouds. No idea where pico is hosted, but Hetzner gives you "unlimited" 1Gps connections with a dedicated server, or a 10G uplink charged at $1.20/TB (plus a fixed monthly fee for the uplink itself).

iambrandonm• 1 year ago

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

ryao3• 1 year ago

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

blatantly3• 1 year ago

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

unshavedyak4• 1 year ago

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?

qudat13• 1 year ago

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).

mxuribe• 1 year ago

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!

bayindirh• 1 year ago

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.

jarbus• 1 year ago

I love this

ctrlp• 1 year ago

This looks awesome. Well done.

mountainriver• 1 year ago

Didn’t Pico used to be a shell grep like search? Or was that another project?

epscylonb• 1 year ago

And a minimal CSS framework.

codazoda2• 1 year ago

I thought it was a Windows SSH / terminal tool. I’m probably remembering wrong.

Edit: Found it already. I was definitely thinking of Putty.

taylorbuley• 1 year ago

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

palata4• 1 year ago

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

IgorPartola• 1 year ago

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.

polishdude20• 1 year ago

So this seems to be a membership to access a remote Unix system and share it with others?

zenoprax• 1 year ago

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.

codazoda2• 1 year ago

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.

antoniomika13• 1 year ago

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

ctippett• 1 year ago

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

antoniomika13• 1 year ago

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.

whalesalad• 1 year ago

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

codetrotter• 1 year ago

https://github.com/picosh/pico/tree/main/pkg/apps/pastes

https://github.com/picosh/pico/blob/main/cmd/pastes/ssh/main...

These looks like they are the code for the pastebin.

There’s a bunch of other code related to their other services in that repo and in their other repos as well.

antoniomika13• 1 year ago

And we'd be happy for you too! All of our code/tools are open source and available here: https://github.com/picosh/pico

qudat13• 1 year ago

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

Happy to answer any questions!

LelouBil• 1 year ago

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

antoniomika13• 1 year ago

Woops! Delete is supported, will update that as well

cfebs• 1 year ago

Sorry if I didn't catch this on the site, but any new upcoming services you are excited about?

A ssh or TUI frontend for some git/forge host like: https://forgejo.org/ would be pretty cool!

vhodges• 1 year ago

https://pr.pico.sh/ and https://github.com/picosh/git-pr :-)

larodi• 1 year ago

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?

antoniomika13• 1 year ago

Correct! The tunnels are protected using ssh auth as well, so you can ensure that only the users you want to access it can.

ryao3• 1 year ago

Cloudflare makes that free through their zero trust stuff and cloudflared daemon.

hakaneskici• 1 year ago

I love your RFC-1, keep up the spirit :)

Where are your servers located?

antoniomika13• 1 year ago

Ashburn, VA and Nuremberg, DE!

raggi4• 1 year ago

What are you doing about TOFU and MITM?

antoniomika13• 1 year ago

Our host keys are published here and are durable: https://pico.sh/host-keys

memset• 1 year ago

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.

qudat13• 1 year ago

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.

WinstonSmith842• 1 year ago

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.

antoniomika13• 1 year ago

Yep! tuns would be the service you want since it can support forwarding arbitrary backends: https://pico.sh/tuns#custom-domains

swznd• 1 year ago

how to manage / remove paste ?

qudat13• 1 year ago

https://pico.sh/file-uploads#how-do-i-delete-files

hei-lima• 1 year ago

This is great! Congratulations.

stouset2• 1 year ago

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.

antoniomika13• 1 year ago

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!

stouset2• 1 year ago

That did it. Thanks!

0xcoffee• 1 year ago

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.

qudat13• 1 year ago

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!

focusgroup0• 1 year ago

See also:

https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish

antoniomika13• 1 year ago

I'd actually highly recommend taking a look at vaxis (https://github.com/rockorager/vaxis). We've moved away from wish/bubbletea and have really enjoyed working with vaxis!

shnpln• 1 year ago

This is awesome!

desireco42• 1 year ago

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.

antoniomika13• 1 year ago

Hrm that's odd! Just tested and everything looks fine. Any logs or errors you can share?

jarboot• 1 year ago

Love to see a midwest/great lakes business address :)

jwr3• 1 year ago

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.

jimbosis• 1 year ago

I had the same frustration as you with finding the pricing information. With some serendipitous clicking, I managed to find it!

https://pico.sh/plus

It does also mention there is a $0 "Starter" tier.

(I found that link on this page:

https://pico.sh/pgs )

EDIT: Mention the Starter tier.

lionkor• 1 year ago

$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?

blatantly3• 1 year ago

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.

conductr• 1 year ago

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.

jwr3• 1 year ago

If you think you can run a business with 10 high-skilled employees on $40,000 of revenue per month, boy, have I got news for you :-)

Similarly, if you think 1000 B2B SaaS subscriptions is an easy-to-achieve number, I'd wager a bet you haven't run a B2B SaaS business.

Roughly, the calculation is: at $40/month, a single subscription brings in $480/year. That means you can safely afford to spend roughly one hour of support on a subscription PER YEAR. If you spend more than 2h, you are definitely in the red. And you will get support requests, of all kinds: the ones you expect, and then all the stuff about lost passwords, inability to log in, network problems, lost invoices, requests to change the billing period, requests for invoices from last year for a customer that has since canceled and been deleted, data export/import, etc.

People who haven't run a business routinely underestimate the costs of running a business and imagine that these numbers mean that business owners are buying yachts and private jets. People who have run a business realize that it's much more difficult to make ends meet than it seems.

cookiemonsieur2• 1 year ago

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.

jwr3• 1 year ago

Well, but that API Gateway x Lambda x DynamoDB combo will not answer support E-mails, will it?

Especially with B2B, it's easy to underestimate the support load for non-technical issues.

qudat13• 1 year ago

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.

scbenet• 1 year ago

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

stego-tech• 1 year ago

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!

TheTaytay• 1 year ago

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.

this_is_madness• 1 year ago

Without being open source this is basically just a walled garden version of sr.ht.

antoniomika13• 1 year ago

We're actually fully open source and all development occurs in the open! Here's the repo https://github.com/picosh/pico and you can find us on Libera IRC

sagarpatil• 1 year ago

I’m sold.

saunved_42• 1 year ago

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.

thelittleone• 1 year ago

Very cool. Though might want to increase contrast on diagrams, for example here https://pico.sh/tuns

lynx972• 1 year ago

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.

bradly2• 1 year ago

rsync uses ssh for remote communication.

lynx972• 1 year ago

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...

Y_Y• 1 year ago

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

caioariede• 1 year ago

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!

jefurii• 1 year ago

If all you want is to scp .html files there's always been shared hosting.

gherard5555• 1 year ago

This web design is very nice to look at

qudat13• 1 year ago

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.

oldandboring• 1 year ago

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.

benoror• 1 year ago

How does it compares with https://bearblog.dev/?

qudat13• 1 year ago

https://prose.sh was absolutely inspired by bearblog. We wanted to leverage SSH for content management. To the reader there is a lot of overlap in terms of minimalism and no-JS.

Lord_Zero• 1 year ago

https://pgs.sh/

Promotion/rollback support Managed HTTPS for all projects Promotion and rollback support

"Promotion and rollback support" twice...

qudat13• 1 year ago

Fixed ty

tempfile• 1 year ago

That's fun, I found and subscribed to tuns.sh only 2 weeks ago. (I wrote up my experience, too https://danielittlewood.xyz/notes/self-hosting-with-tunnels)

anonfordays• 1 year ago

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 others openly follow suite.

rjurney2• 1 year ago

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

qudat13• 1 year ago

So you probably shouldn’t trust any external service and we do have the ability to subscribe to any topic. But we have zero interest in snooping unless we discover illegal activity at which point we will take immediate action.

rjurney2• 1 year ago

I don't really mean you, but let's say you are compromised... if I put a localhost http server up on the web using your stuff, am I now compromised? Not clear how this would work...

hiatus• 1 year ago

It is strange, I tried to add my public key but received a response that it was already in use (!). Is there a way to determine the user associated with a public key? Perhaps it's possible I have previously created an account but I feel I would remember the UI.

qudat13• 1 year ago

Email us at hello@pico.sh and we can triage

fragmede• 1 year ago

SSH is kind of a secret hidden interface because of how nerdy it is, so I feel that it goes underappreciated sometimes. I host one such interface, do ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no funky.nondeterministic.computer and see what's on offer!

paul_h• 1 year ago

If not using the custom domain stuff, cookies need protection via Set-Cookie with `SameSite=Strict`, right? I couldn't see a note in the documentation

sjtgraham• 1 year ago

$2/month is way too cheap. What's the realistic market size here? How much of that is achievable to capture within 24 months? It doesn't seem like it would even support a single developer's salary within that time. Things like this make me worry that this will not be around for long. Even an extremely talented and motivated solo founder will run out of steam earning a fraction of what their skills are worth serving the most fussy, demanding and ungrateful audience imaginable: nerds.

OP increase your prices!

Pico.sh – SSH powered services for developers

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