Why Another Cloud IDE?

Personally, I've tried many different platforms — GitHub Codespaces, Replit, Gitpod Classic, etc. — because I tend to work from different locations and devices. However, as powerful as those tools are, I find them quite pricey because they offer fixed CPU and RAM configurations and charge a flat monthly price regardless of my usage.

With Cortado, I’m aiming to keep bills as low as possible, charging users for exactly how much compute, memory, and storage they use. And they can choose extremely specific machine configurations too, opting for GPUs if needed as well.

What Are Some Key Features?

The features are summarised and explained below, but can also be found on the landing page: https://cortado.obsivision.com.

Low Profit Margin

I’ve tried to keep the profit margin extremely low for Cortado, since I understand the pain that other devs feel when they have to pay through the nose to simply have a workspace on the cloud. Before an environment is created, users can see the compute prices per hour, estimated bill before markup, and the actual billing price. I hope that this transparency can ease any doubts about how much I am marking up the prices. Furthermore, a significant portion of the revenue generated from the markup go back into paying for web hosting, funding the development of other features, and more coffees.

Jobs

Sometimes, your environment has low compute requirements, but some tasks (such as builds or ML training) need higher compute. For this, you can create a job, which spawns a clone of your environment and allows you to reconfigure the compute for the new environment. You can specify a command to be executed in the new environment, and Cortado will automatically merge the final state of the environment back into your old one, before deleting the newly-created environment. Thus, you gain temporary access to higher compute without administrative overhead or high bills.

Realtime Resource Monitoring

Cortado allows you to monitor the CPU-seconds of compute, GB-seconds of RAM/storage consumed so that you always know where your bill is currently sitting. You can also set hard budget limits to prevent runaway processes from leaving you destitute.

Interface

Only the VSCode interface is supported for now, since Cortado starts the code server on the backend and connects to it via Remote Tunnels.

What’s Next for the Project?

If you’re interested, you can visit https://cortado.obsivision.com which contains a registration form. Even if you’re semi-interested and don’t want to sign up for a free trial, you could leave some feedback on the form as well. I would love to hear what features users would be interested in, as well as any concerns you may have. A DM to this account or an email to project.cortado@gmail.com would be more than welcome. Maybe you don’t have any feedback or concerns to raise, but instead just want to chat about the product or the process — I’d be more than happy to hear your thoughts!