We charge by the second. Here's why.

Pricing is the thing most cloud workspace companies get wrong by inheritance. They look at what AWS WorkSpaces does ($25-100 per user per month, billed flat), notice AWS does it that way, and copy the model.

We didn't.

DeskBoot Starter is $0.05/hour. Run it 12 minutes, pay $0.01. Run it 4 hours, pay $0.20. Forget about it for a week, pay roughly $8.40 — and we'll email you at the $2 low-balance line so you can decide whether to keep it going or stop it.

No flat fee. No monthly minimum. No "platform fee" on top of compute.

The reasoning

People use cloud workspaces in bursts, not in 8-hour shifts. The biggest UX win we can deliver is making the bill irrelevant to the decision. If you ask yourself "is it worth launching a Kali instance for 20 minutes of work" and the answer is "$0.02 worth of compute", you launch it. You do the work. You learn something.

If you have to ask "is this worth the $30 flat monthly", the answer is no, you don't do the work, the tool doesn't get used.

The math at realistic scale

Crossover is around 600 hours per month, which is 20 hours a day every single day. If you're using a cloud workspace that hard, buy a workstation. For literally everyone else, per-second wins.

Windows is the one wrinkle

Microsoft licensing adds $0.04/hour on top of Windows instance pricing. You'd pay that regardless of which cloud company you go through. It's their fee, not ours. We pass it through unchanged and show it on the launch screen so there's no surprise on the invoice.

What this forces on us as a company

Two things, both healthy. First, we have zero monthly-revenue inertia. A user who doesn't use the product doesn't pay us. The incentive is clear: be useful every session.

Second, our cost discipline matters. We don't run a fleet of idle instances waiting for someone to claim them — that model burns cash and we'd be passing it on. Every session is a customer's own instance, launched on demand, terminated on signal. AWS bills us per second; you pay us per second.

Clean.