Show HN: Elestio – Managed platform for over 150 open-source software stacks
In 2009, we started deploying open-source software for websites and web apps we built, many for SMB and enterprise customers. Our process was basically: spin up VM's from a hosting provider, install the software we needed, then update it manually / when it was needed / critical, etc.
Once we hit > 100 servers/services needing updates, backups, capacity monitoring and alerting, etc. we saw that it was getting totally unmanageable… so we built what would eventually become elestio.
We've put a lot, a lot, a lot of work into building something that allows us (and now you) to deploy a new service in just a few minutes, with zero ongoing maintenance / devops overhead. We basically turned open-source software into a SaaS experience.
We update all the apps, respecting SemVer on the branch you select, issue and renew SSL certs automatically (even for your own domains, for free), automatically implement a 3-2-1 backup strategy, caching is handled and we put your service behind a configurable firewall and rate limiter with sane defaults. We have implemented Nebula to connect your services hosted in different datacenters across regions and providers as if they were on the same network and Borg backups to do deduplicated incremental backups in a remote datacenter.
There were many challenges in building it… VM providers don't have homogenous or feature-complete APIs for provisioning servers, we tested 6 different mesh networking/VPN solutions to enable services running in different datacenters, regions, or providers to connect to each other securely, and we did a lot of work to create a sane templating system that covers setup, security, backups, upgrade, migrations and monitoring, lots of work to test the safest ways to update OS and apps without breaking things… but we got there and it works really well (we think)! Deployments are based on Docker, which helped a lot to standardize everything.
We've been using it to deploy and maintain over 12,000 services for our own enterprise clients and we've spent the last year making it user-friendly (and even more bulletproof for end-user configs). Elestio can currently deploy any one of over 150 open-source software stacks like Postgres, MySQL, OpenSearch, Redis, Wordpress, NodeBB, Jitsi, Uptime-kuma, Plausible, GitLab,, Strapi, Ghost, or even PowerDns, Grafana, ClickHouse, etc. in about 3 minutes, flat.
We currently support AWS Lightsail, Linode, Hetzner, Vultr and Digital Ocean, and BringYourOwnVM, if you want to run on your own provider account or even on-premise but have all the features of managed services. We are offering 1 BYOVM service per customer for free forever.
Something we really wanted to do was make sure we were part of a healthy open-source ecosystem. To that end, elestio will donate part of all revenue to the open-source projects our customers are using. We will review this annually and if it's possible to increase it, we will. This is a win-win-win to us. Open-source developers and communities get more resources to improve their software while our customers, our staff and other stakeholders know that they are helping to support the open-source community.
For this launch we made a partnership with DigitalOcean, they are offering $250 of free credits on Elestio if you go through this link: https://try.digitalocean.com/elestio/
Alternatively you can also register here and get $20 of free credits but not limited to DO infrastructure: https://dash.elest.io/signup
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 87.8 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/elestio/cloudgate https://github.com/elestio/nginx-auto-ssl https://github.com/elestio/ws-screenshot https://github.com/elestio/nebula-rest-api
We are also going to publish our light live monitoring system (backend and agent) based on websockets
More to come :)
I can't wait to check your setup out.
Great job btw! Maintenance and support is one of the major issues preventing wider adoption of open source software.
Our pricing is a combination of provider/Region/VM size. The lowest price is $0.014/hour for 1 vCPU/2GB RAM/20GB NVME, if you consider 730hours per month this means the monthly price will be ~ $10.22.
But you can delete the service at any time and this will stop the billing immediately. There are no commitments, we only charge hourly.
It's really cool because you have out of the box a private network across all cloud providers and also works for on-premise deployments
[1] https://github.com/slackhq/nebula
[2] https://github.com/elestio/nebula-rest-api
1) We want to avoid additional services having impacts on your main service, like one of the services, could use all the resources (cpu, ram, disk) and crash everything else.
2) We are offering several types of backups, including daily full VM snapshots, if you need to restore a VM snapshot this will impact all the software on the VM
3) Price overhead of having a single service per VM is acceptable for fully managed services, where ensuring the quality of service is worth the few more bucks to guarantee that.
4) We do provide root SSH access to the VM, so you are free to run some additional stuff, but we do management only on the software we support and the part we auto-deploy
I know and have used Softaculous to install and maintain Wordpress and other applications in the past.
Also Softaculous templates where a bit old and not always maintained, on our side we have a totally different implementation and we are doing semVer updates based on tags available on docker hub, monitoring, alerts, backups, migrations, security and more.
We also have support for MySQL & KeyDB multi-master clusters, and we are going to introduce soon more cluster options
https://doc.elest.io/books/database-clusters/page/mysql-clus...
Here's a suggestion: instead of quoting your own rate, instead say "we charge X% over and above our hourly cost for AWS, Digital Ocean, etc." That kind of price transparency would go a long way for me.
I also wouldn't have to spend hours trying to figure out what instances you use, the hourly rate, what you're charging, am I getting ripped off, and redo the whole process every six months.
Management fees are based on the VM size you connect, we charge $5 per CPU + $2.5 per GB RAM + 0.25 per 10GB/disk. This is a monthly estimation but this is also billed per hour without any commitment.
Let's take an example, if you have a VM with 1 CPU/1GB RAM/20GB disk, total per month for the management fees are 5+2.5+0.5 = $8 per month.
And for that price you get automated OS & Software updates, alerts & monitoring, global private networking, automated remote backups with versioning in another DC, Migration capabilities and few other things.
For example for the micro option in digital ocean, the barebones droplet is $6/month. Your price is $16/month. If you showed this, I'd know I'm paying you $10 for the ease of use. If you don't show this, I have to calculate it. Unless your plans would be to offer your own hosting down the line - where it would make sense to have only a lump total cost, I don't see the advantage in keeping it hidden (specially since you're clearly open about showing how you're charging per CPU/RAM/disk here in the comments).
Cool product!
What makes you think these folks pay full price for a VM with their partners? What value do you get out of it now knowing that? It's similar to asking any business to disclose to you their costs.
I would disregard this and keep your pricing as is. If users find value in the CPU / RAM + service at price point X, great.
Very promising project, (and seems very good fit for HN too) keep up the good work!
from the service dashboard you can rescale vertically your service at any time manually in few clicks, we also have an api that allow to do that (and anything else that can be done from our frontend).
Doing it on a single node imply some downtime to rescale the instance. We do have an auto-rescale feature in our roadmap for later this year with our clusters plans
However, as someone who relies a lot on Hetzner and AWS, it would be hard to justify a X10 increase in cost. I run my ClickHouse clusters in ax101 servers in Hetzner for roughly 110€/month while similar specs seem to cost 1226 USD/month.
Trust me, I'd like to externalise it but not at this cost :)
But considering a smaller instance, does it make sense to do everything by yourself instead of paying $10 per month?
Same question can be asked to businesses with less technical skills than you, how much are they ready to pay for this kind of fully managed services. AWS RDS for example is pretty expensive, with us you can have a multi-master MySQL 8 cluster for $20
It definitely wouldn't make sense to do the work you can outsource for 10 or even 100 euros a month and your example for MySQL 8 is indeed very good. (I run many RDS instances too so I'm familiar with the product and its price.)
However, I would like you to consider people like me a potential target too for top-spec use cases. Would I be willing to consider to pay x3 times rather than x10? Maybe! Probably at the cost 1-3 year commitment, as AWS, I would. Who knows?
Usually big companies have a budget line and one of these is the cloud provider. They don't tend to scrutinize the bill, just the bottom line.
Only thing I'd be aware about though is making sure you're on the right side of licensing for all the vendors you're using (/ possibly who you've talked with to make sure the usage is ok).
Off the top I saw N8N on the homepage who are a little more strict about their licensing for cloud vendors. There's also Airbyte and Redpanda who use Elastic and BSL licenses to try and deter cloud vendors from packaging some parts of their services.
Yes, indeed, we are monitoring this and of course we have removed all SSPL softwares from our catalog.
Airbyte license is MIT, and deploying elasticsearch as part of another software should not be an issue (but I'm not a lawyer and might be wrong), from my understanding what's forbidden is to offer Elasticsearch as a SaaS service but using it as part of a solution like Airbyte is OK. We don't offer Elasticsearch but we offer Opensearch as an alternative.
N8N seems to be under Apache 2 license with Commons Clause (https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/LICENSE.md), I do see now that there is a specific clause about hosting fees, we do charge for management fees and also hosting fees. I'll try to contact them directly and check if we can sign a contract with them, if not it will definitely be removed from our catalog.
We really want to be on the good side of this, we want to create a sustainable stream of revenue to open-source authors, not killing them. So we will definitely comply with licenses and law.
Great work!
What if you roll out an update and bring us down? What are your service agreements? Your historical status page? Any known incidents or outages?
Edit:
> Our in-house monitoring and alerting tools allow us to provide up to 99.99% uptime guarantees for enterprise deployments.
What does enterprise deployments mean, for example? There's no enterprise pricing as far as I can tell.
I planned to publish on our blog technical articles about how we handle things at elestio (processes, backups, security, networking, ...), this should help potential customers to know our pratices and how serious we are with handling security, customer data and backups.
Our upgrade process will install new versions only for the selected major branch of your software, also we always do backups just before the upgrade so you are able to revert in a click. Finally you can also test upgrades on a clone of your service in few clicks, because we do hourly billing this test will only cost a cent or two ;)
We are going to publish soon our service agreements (there is 3 versions based on the support plan selected), Standard, Premium and Enterprise, more details are available on our pricing page about that: https://elest.io/pricing (Elestio support plans, at end of the page)
About the status page, yes it's something that we will make public this week as well (it's based on uptime kuma, a great OSS from our catalog)
I tried to go to billing, there is nothing in there at all. I went to my user profile, and there's a tab "payment options" that says I have no credit card added but doesn't give me the option to add one. There's also a tab "add credits" which lets me type in an amount to add and apparently click "pay now" despite not actually requesting any payment information.
Finally I discovered by clicking around on everything that if I go to "services" there's a message to add a payment card. I click the button to add details and I'm given a prompt to accept terms and conditions and provide... not credit card details but a link to a social profile? Apparently this is some sort of fraud prevention thing? You want to see who I am? I have no idea what this is, but at this point, I'm frustrated with the user experience, don't see any path forward to actually trying the service, and don't trust you with any more information. No paid service I have ever used has asked for a link to a social profile.
I'm really sorry. I wanted so much to try this out and love it, but the experience around actually getting set up to try it is so frustrating and confusing right now that I'm just done.
I hope these are just growing pains that will be worked out because I think the concept here is great. I'll come back some day with an open mind and try again. I wish you nothing but the best in this journey.
Indeed adding a card is done when clicking on pay now button (next step is a redirection to Stripe Checkout page), I definitely agree this should be enhanced and it will!
About the social profile url, we are asking that to prevent fraud risks and also to avoid having to charge $1 to get a Risk score from Stripe. It's strange but I discovered the only way to get a risk score from Stripe radar is to do a real charge (a pre-auth or just adding a card is not enough). We also tried a strategy to charge $1 then auto refund it, but Stripe do not refund the transaction charge anymore.
So we ended up with this social profile option as a fraud check, it's quite effective to keep hackers and abusers away ... unfortunately it seems it's also too much friction for new customers.
I'll definitely rediscuss this point with the team tomorrow morning, please give us another chance in few days ;)
Can you elaborate a little.
The list of apps offered is impressive and the service is expansive and gives back to F/OSS. Excited to see elestio succeed in the future.
For people who want to use F/OSS software but not necessarily to host it themselves and have to worry about updates/etc, elestio is perfect