So Val town is basically AWS Lambda. That still doesn't give me a good explanation of a "val". I'm guessing they don't want to use an AWS trademark but when I loaded the page I got a nice big table of prices and no useful definition of a "val".
It always surprises me when a tech company doesn't use the proper MB GB.
It's one thing if they just don't care (screw the pedants, whatever) or don't know (which is scary but whatever), but valueing looks/typeface more than technical details in their technical offering is just bizarre.
I feel compelled to tell you that your website explains your product and what I might use it for incredibly well. It's a surprisingly rate trait in a service/product marketing site.
Any word on other language support? I kind of imagine a local hosted version quite similar to this being quite useful, and while this isn't locally run it's also quite cheap, so i wouldn't mind using it instead of local.
With that said, i'd still want to "use my own languages". My specific interest being Rust.
Our strategy is to go extremely deep into one language/ecosystem (JS/TS) and be able to provide extremely good tooling around it. The downside is that there won't be a Rust version any time soon, if ever.
I would make a plug for TypeScript though. It's a pretty fantastic language and while it's not Rust, I learned in my last startup that it's not that much slower than Rust, that much of the time: https://zaplib.com/docs/blog_post_mortem.html
I'll add a +1 to praising your (sadly rare) ability to actually explain what your product does on your product's landing page. I got it instantly from your tagline "If GitHub Gists could run And AWS Lambda were fun".
I can see myself using this for one-off scripts and personal stuff. Out of curiosity, is it intended for more than that as well?
I originally called it eval town and called the units of computation evals, but my friend JP pulled a sean parker on me and told me to drop the 'e', and it became val town! It's short for 'eval' or 'evaluation' or 'value' as in a 'javascript value'. What's value town?
Really appreciate that you understand the value prop!
We want to be used for all sorts of compute one day, but want to start with lighter-weight things (think zapier for programmers or api prototyping) but one day scale to be a real aws or heroku replacement, but that's a long ways off
Today the way you can do it is either 1) polling for new things (scheduled vals make this really easy) or 2) creating a webhook with val town (also super easy if the service you want has webhooks).
Happy to help with either of these: email me at steve@val.town if you want to pair program or something :)
I’m thinking the val author could require a Notion auth in order to run the val. Once I’m logged-in, the val can use my creds to make requests to Notion API on my behalf.
What would also be a amazing is to be able to configure custom inputs and show a UI to add/overwrite these input params before I run a val. I’m thinking similar to the forms feature in Google Colab
Our use case: we have some TypeScript scripts that we want to expose to our non-technical folks. Currently we share the scripts via GitHub and let them run them with Deno as CLI.
Thanks for your kind offer, btw.! We don’t have a urge right now, but will be more than happy to migrate our scripts to val, once there is a way to work around the points above!
Really love what you’re doing with val. We are big fans already and will be watching closely!
One more thing: just tried the editor and one thing i’m already missing is GitHub co-pilot. Maybe there is a way to integrate co-pilot into val? Zed editor just did same very recently
From the website: "Vals are small JavaScript or TypeScript snippets of code, written in the browser and run in our servers. Create scheduled functions, email yourself, and persist small pieces of data — all from the browser."
These use cases confuse me. If I needed to schedule an email to myself, why wouldn't I just run a simple local node server with my JS function on my home computer?
I'm sure it's a failure of my imagination but I'd just love to have more salient "ah ha!" example use cases of this platform.
I love this idea of interdependent scripts that everyone can build powerful things on top of.
If only more companies were automatable such as groceries, Amazon shopping, pizza/food delivery, automatic webhosting (upload an tgz file and host a static site)
I'm having a hard time understanding the pricing model.
As far as I can tell the pro plan gets you (max) 432,000 CPU seconds a month. Let's assume this is about equivalent to a 1GB lambda instance. That amount of CPU time and requests costs around $8/mo, and if you use less you pay less. I guess Val lets you run low-CPU tasks in the background for waiting on web requests, etc., but you can also do this with low-memory lambda instances.
With lambda you also know that Amazon will stand behind the pricing structure, and the service won't disappear/10x pricing in a few years when it's time to juice the stats.
It is nice to see competition in this space, but the pitch would be improved by offering a clearer value prop over existing offerings like Lambda.
Val Town Pro is priced around "developer productivity" more than low-level compute costs. Ideally you start as a free user and find the platform so useful that when you bump against the limitations, you're happy to pay $10/month for more resources.
I'll have to agree with you here. There's no way you can compete with AWS on price per compute cycle. Just compete on the experience and simplicity. That's what's compelling about this.
I think it would be cool if you eventually provided an app to facilitate people who want an easy way to get notifications on mobile devices. There are services which will already do this, but would be nice to have one bundled with the paid plan which wasn't liable to go away.
I've started using NetNewsWire for this recently - it can poll RSS/Atom feeds and show notifications.
It's not real-time though. For real-time notifications I've had good results from using either Slack or Discord with bots publishing to channels via webhooks.
You used to be able to do something very similar with Perl, right? A bunch of independent scripts that were basically web endpoints? I forget the name of those little scripts...
As a val.town user and former cgi-bin user, I'd say it's a bit similar in terms of how I use it. If webhooks were a thing in the cgi-bin days and I needed a one-off script to run every time a webhook fired, I would have put a script in cgi-bin. Now I'd create a val.
Thanks for answering. I guess you guys are paying yourselves competitively. I thought most startups pay maybe 150k + equity with maybe a one year runway. Which would mean you would be able to support a team of 10.
This is really neat. I don't have much trouble deploying a Netlify function, but I like the idea of being able to schedule your cloud functions like Chron jobs. I might just use this for a future project.
Congrats Steve and Andre! Product has come a long way since I got a demo 9 months ago, and definitely see the applications and applicability of the product now :)
Looking forwards to what you guys are able to continue building in the future--and will likely be using Valtown for scripts of my own!
This is rad! Its so simple to use and I love the idea of making things composable and building off everyone else's code, I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the different ways to use this. Keep up the good work!
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadTook two seconds by going to the home page.
I can't really figure out the "Why would I care?" part from their website. I've been hearing them pop up a bunch. Just don't understand what they do.
"""
What is Val Town?
Val Town is a social website to write and run code.
Vals are small JavaScript or TypeScript snippets of code, written in the browser and run in our servers.
Create scheduled functions, email yourself, and persist small pieces of data — all from the browser.
"""
It's one thing if they just don't care (screw the pedants, whatever) or don't know (which is scary but whatever), but valueing looks/typeface more than technical details in their technical offering is just bizarre.
That may be, but...
> it's just a purely aesthetic choice.
SI metric prefixes[0] are case-sensitive; "mb" is not the same as "Mb". Not that computing has ever been rigorous on this point, but the point stands.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefi...
That's so absurdly specific. I love it!
Is that not what you meant? :D
We're trying to make a new kind of web primitive, like a Tweet or a Github repo, or more pointedly, like a Github Gist, but one that runs.
With that said, i'd still want to "use my own languages". My specific interest being Rust.
I would make a plug for TypeScript though. It's a pretty fantastic language and while it's not Rust, I learned in my last startup that it's not that much slower than Rust, that much of the time: https://zaplib.com/docs/blog_post_mortem.html
I'll add a +1 to praising your (sadly rare) ability to actually explain what your product does on your product's landing page. I got it instantly from your tagline "If GitHub Gists could run And AWS Lambda were fun".
I can see myself using this for one-off scripts and personal stuff. Out of curiosity, is it intended for more than that as well?
I originally called it eval town and called the units of computation evals, but my friend JP pulled a sean parker on me and told me to drop the 'e', and it became val town! It's short for 'eval' or 'evaluation' or 'value' as in a 'javascript value'. What's value town?
Really appreciate that you understand the value prop!
We want to be used for all sorts of compute one day, but want to start with lighter-weight things (think zapier for programmers or api prototyping) but one day scale to be a real aws or heroku replacement, but that's a long ways off
What would be amazing is if i could also connect my Notion account to somebody else’s val so they could run the val using my credentials.
Today the way you can do it is either 1) polling for new things (scheduled vals make this really easy) or 2) creating a webhook with val town (also super easy if the service you want has webhooks).
Happy to help with either of these: email me at steve@val.town if you want to pair program or something :)
I’m thinking the val author could require a Notion auth in order to run the val. Once I’m logged-in, the val can use my creds to make requests to Notion API on my behalf.
What would also be a amazing is to be able to configure custom inputs and show a UI to add/overwrite these input params before I run a val. I’m thinking similar to the forms feature in Google Colab
Our use case: we have some TypeScript scripts that we want to expose to our non-technical folks. Currently we share the scripts via GitHub and let them run them with Deno as CLI.
Thanks for your kind offer, btw.! We don’t have a urge right now, but will be more than happy to migrate our scripts to val, once there is a way to work around the points above!
Really love what you’re doing with val. We are big fans already and will be watching closely!
Yeah, I'd love to win that usecase away from github scripts + locally running via deno! One day!
A better "web primitive" would be something portable/federated.
I'm sure it's a failure of my imagination but I'd just love to have more salient "ah ha!" example use cases of this platform.
What are the limitations?
I love this idea of interdependent scripts that everyone can build powerful things on top of.
If only more companies were automatable such as groceries, Amazon shopping, pizza/food delivery, automatic webhosting (upload an tgz file and host a static site)
As far as I can tell the pro plan gets you (max) 432,000 CPU seconds a month. Let's assume this is about equivalent to a 1GB lambda instance. That amount of CPU time and requests costs around $8/mo, and if you use less you pay less. I guess Val lets you run low-CPU tasks in the background for waiting on web requests, etc., but you can also do this with low-memory lambda instances.
With lambda you also know that Amazon will stand behind the pricing structure, and the service won't disappear/10x pricing in a few years when it's time to juice the stats.
It is nice to see competition in this space, but the pitch would be improved by offering a clearer value prop over existing offerings like Lambda.
Val Town Pro is priced around "developer productivity" more than low-level compute costs. Ideally you start as a free user and find the platform so useful that when you bump against the limitations, you're happy to pay $10/month for more resources.
It's not real-time though. For real-time notifications I've had good results from using either Slack or Discord with bots publishing to channels via webhooks.
edit: CGI ?
[1]: https://github.com/nbd-wtf/nostr-tools
I was hoping to get a Python script running there via Deno + WebAssembly + Pyodide, mainly because it would have been an entertaining hack!
I tried to get a version of this running there: https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/pyodide-sandbox
From about page you said you raise 1.5mm in pre seed funding. congratulations.
Your about says you're not hiring, so what are you planning on doing with the money? That struck me as an astronomical amount esp for a pre seed
https://kruzeconsulting.com/do-founders-of-startups-that-hav...
- the cost of an employee is not just their salary, but health insurance, taxes, a computer setup
- it costs something to run the service
So they may well be paying 4 people 150K each, and they have a year of runway.
I would like to make all of these code examples interactive
https://ray.run/blog/tips-for-writing-efficient-playwright-t...
This requires running Chrome on the VM though
Does this work with Val?
Looking forwards to what you guys are able to continue building in the future--and will likely be using Valtown for scripts of my own!