[mritchie712]

Are you thinking Thread would be an open-source alternative to Hex (https://hex.tech)?

I was thinking of doing something like this last year, but I couldn't figure out a good business model. Google Colab is cheap (free, $10 per month) and Hex isn't that expensive (considering the compute cost they need to cover).

If you focus on local, you're going against VS Code and Jupyter. Both are free and very good.

[alishobeiri]

It's something we are considering, I think Hex provides a lot of features that aren't available in existing local notebooks (SQL, reactive cell execution) that we hope to integrate for sure. I think both Jupyter and VS Code are really strong players in the space so one of the concerns we have was around whether the feature set would be compelling enough to get people to switch. (Which is why we wanted to post to test the initial reaction :))

The reason we wanted to focus on running things locally is that we were both engineers at big companies in the past, and we didn't have access to tools like Hex but we could use local tools. Our initial thesis is to bring the best development experience local and see if there is an opportunity to build a business model around collaboration features.

[mritchie712]

That sounds like a good plan. I think you're right to focus on the local experience. Good luck!