Doesn't it seem odd to have "Pricing" for a protocol that's meant to serve a similar function to IP addresses? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.
Doesn't it seem odd to have "Pricing" for a protocol that's meant to serve a similar function to IP addresses? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.
As others have already mentioned, iroh the core library and protocol is fully open source. But to finance the development of it, we offer additional services to make it easier to deploy and run it, especially for larger or more specialized use caes.
Congrats for the launch, seems to have matured a bunch and Iroh gotten a bunch of neat additions since I last looked! You even managed to get 1.0 out the door before go-ipfs / Kubo ;)
> But to finance the development of it, we offer additional services to make it easier to deploy and run it, especially for larger or more specialized use caes.
Interesting (and somewhat proven) idea to finance it, smart :)
Did you guys started doing this already on a case-by-case basis and have some experience of it already, and if so what are the common things you typically help out with exactly? I'm just curious what sort of things a company who'd use a protocol like that might need help with, that they wouldn't have experience with in-house, since they're going down a P2P road already (assuming that, maybe maybe need help with greenfield projects)?
we have been doing this for a while now, you can find some of our highlights listed here https://www.iroh.computer/solutions
I think it would be clearer if you put the "Pricing" navbar link under "Services."
I don't mind paying for a subscription, as long as I'm not also paying for the privilege of being locked in to a specific vendor. If I pay for a subscription and then your prices quadruple or something, what are my options? Can I self-host a relay? Do I lose features if I do so?
I'm not affiliated. From what I understand, they provide an open-source implementation of the relay server: https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh/tree/main/iroh-relay (which may or may not be what they actually run as part of their hosted offering).
If you use their offering, you probably get some kind of web interface for metrics that isn't open-source.
Correct
Yes you can self-host your relays. Forever! Please check out the docs & hosting pages more information:
https://docs.iroh.computer/concepts/relays https://www.iroh.computer/services/hosting
tailscale syndrome.
"we want to be infrastructure for people, and a business towards professionals."
stuck between "we need cash to operate" and "we want to be a public good infrastructural system." , with the negative parts of a for-profit whisked away with "Well it's open source."
it's a business concept i'm okayish with as long as the "Well it's open source." caveat doesn't come with a total bespoke and unusable code base to figure out.
Take a look yourself.
Our code is as good as we can make it, and everything is modular and well documented. For example our QUIC implementation noq which underlies every iroh connection can also be used as a standalone QUIC impl that implements QUIC multipath.
https://docs.rs/noq/latest/noq/
If we wanted to have "total bespoke and unusable code" we would have inlined all of this into the iroh repo to make it unusable.
Not affiliated, but I am a very happy user of Tailscale and a very happy user of Iroh; we use the latter in production at work.
Tailscale is a great service that happens to be open source, but Iroh is clearly structured as a library that you can build into whatever you want.
fwiw, Tailscale happens to be mostly open source, not completely. Yes, I know Headscale exists, it does not implement all the Tailscale functions (not non-functional production type capabilities)
RustDesk has a similar business model and works fine for what it is, is there something particular about TailScale and Iroh that makes you think it will not work?
From the same pricing page, it's all additional services: observability, relay hosting, support engineers.
The equivalent for IP addresses to what they offer would be closer to running a BGP router or ISP, or generally contracting with network engineers for your data-center's networking.
If you want to run an ISP or AS, believe me it will cost you a decent chunk of money.
I've been running my own AS for years. You can get an ASN and IPv6 from a RIPE LIR for $200/year or less. Then you need a couple of VPSes that are BGP capable. You can get those for $20 month. Then you can tunnel traffic back to your location with a Wireguard tunnel or whatever you prefer. It's relatively cheap! I also have a legacy IPv4 block I'm routing, which doesn't cost me anything.
Maybe. It's offering "Customized hosting and monitoring for Iroh apps".