The pitch: how to sell exe.dev
How to open, what to ask, and what each person in the room cares about. Every claim here links to exe.dev’s docs or pricing page, checked 2026-10-23. Competitor numbers live on the competitive page, each with its own source.
The one-liner
One flat price for a pool of Linux boxes, and every box already has HTTPS, login and sharing.
You pay for CPU and memory, not per VM, and the VMs in a pool share it (https://exe.dev/docs/what-is-exe, https://exe.dev/docs/pools). Each VM is served at https://vmname.exe.xyz/, private until you share it (https://exe.dev/docs/proxy, https://exe.dev/docs/sharing).
The 30-second version
“You know how every dev box, preview or agent machine turns into a small project? A VM, a public IP, a cert, a reverse proxy, some auth, then a way to show it to a colleague. exe.dev skips all of that. ssh exe.dev new gives you a real Linux VM in about two seconds, with a persistent disk, already on HTTPS and private to you. share add with an email gives someone access. And you don’t pay per box: a team pays $75 a month plus capacity, and up to 1,000 VMs share each pool.”
Sources: https://exe.dev/docs/what-is-exe, https://exe.dev/docs/faq/how-exedev-works, https://exe.dev/docs/sharing, https://exe.dev/docs/billing/work
The two-minute version
- It’s just a computer. A real VM with
sudo, systemd, Docker and a normal file system. “Run a database on it. Write logs to it. Use sqlite” (https://exe.dev/docs/serverful, https://exe.dev/docs/faq/docker). - The front door is done for you. exe.dev terminates TLS and proxies to your VM, so there is no IP, cert or nginx per box. Your app gets the visitor’s identity in
X-ExeDev-Email(https://exe.dev/docs/faq/how-exedev-works, https://exe.dev/docs/login-with-exe). - Pools, not per-VM bills. Personal starts at $15/month for 2 vCPU and 4 GB shared by up to 50 VMs. Work is $75/month for the whole team, not per person, plus $0.105 per 2 vCPU / 4 GiB unit-hour of extra capacity (https://exe.dev/pricing, https://exe.dev/docs/billing/work).
- Secrets stay off the box. Integrations hold credentials server-side and inject them at the edge, and
egress <vm> integrationslimits outbound traffic (https://exe.dev/docs/integrations, https://exe.dev/docs/internet-access). - Agents are built in. Shelley runs on every default-image VM, and
claude,codexandpiship in the image (https://exe.dev/docs/shelley/intro, https://exe.dev/docs/upgrade-codex). - It grows up. Admin and member roles, Google or OIDC SSO, sharing controls, and Enterprise single-tenant hosts, BYOC and a 99.9% SLA (https://exe.dev/docs/billing/work, https://exe.dev/docs/teams/sso, https://exe.dev/docs/teams/sharing-controls, https://exe.dev/docs/enterprise-sla).
Discovery questions
Ask these before you pitch. The answers tell you which story to lead with.
| Ask | Listen for | Lead with |
|---|---|---|
| How many dev, preview or agent boxes does the team run today? | “Dozens”, “every PR”, “every agent” | Pool economics |
| How long until a new box has HTTPS and a URL a colleague can open? | Days, tickets, a platform team | Proxy, login, sharing |
| Where do agent and CI tokens live today? | “On the box”, “.env files” | Integrations and egress |
| What happens to a box when the laptop closes? | Codespaces timeouts, local machines | Persistent VMs |
| Who pays when a box sits idle? | Per-VM bills, forgotten servers | Shared pool |
| Do you have data-residency or single-tenant requirements? | Compliance, regulated data | Enterprise hosts and BYOC |
Value by person in the room
- Developer. “
ssh exe.dev newand you have a box on HTTPS in seconds. No tickets.” (https://exe.dev/docs/what-is-exe) - Engineering lead. “One bill for the whole team. Adding teammates doesn’t change the price.” (https://exe.dev/docs/billing/work)
- Security. “Sites are private by default, tokens stay off the VM, and admins decide who can share outside the team.” (https://exe.dev/docs/proxy, https://exe.dev/docs/integrations, https://exe.dev/docs/teams/sharing-controls)
- Platform team. “No reverse proxies, certs or auth to run per box, and everything is scriptable over SSH, HTTPS or MCP.” (https://exe.dev/docs/api, https://exe.dev/docs/https-api, https://exe.dev/docs/mcp)
- Finance. “Capacity is the bill. Idle boxes share a pool instead of each costing a VM.” (https://exe.dev/docs/pools)
When not to push
Be straight about fit. exe.dev has no kernel choice, no private network between VMs, one public HTTPS port per VM, and no public IP per VM (https://exe.dev/docs/faq/how-exedev-works, https://exe.dev/docs/faq/cross-vm-networking, https://exe.dev/docs/proxy). If the customer needs those, say so early. See the objections page for the answers to common pushback.