We’ve outsourced the storage of our devices onto the cloud through services like DropBox, so why not look to shift the muscle behind them to the cloud as well?
Frame, a company that allows you to run desktop applications in your browser over the cloud, is launching its services with a worldwide beta this week. Users can now run any Windows program they desire through the service which allows users, for instance, the ability to run Adobe Premiere on a netbook.
The company just raised a $10 million Series A last month with participation from Columbus Nova Technology Partners, Bain Capital Ventures and SQN Venture Partners.
The service is pretty wild. I did some heavy editing on a couple of graphics inside Adobe Photoshop through Frame on my laptop and never ran into any snags. Recently, I’ve been lusting after the latest Macbook, but what’s been holding me back are the pretty limited specs on it that would hold me back from occasionally editing video or an infographic. A service like Frame that can let me access graphics-heavy internals through the cloud could really solve that issue.
The tiered pricing for the beta honestly seems to be a little wonky fresh out of the gate though. Base plans for personal use start at $9.99 per month and give you access to 200 credits (plans for businesses start at $12.99 per user), which equals out to about twenty hours of usage on a 1-core PC with 4 gigs of RAM, possibly enough to wade your way through Photoshop. With any video-editing or rendering though, you’ll want to at least upgrade to the “Standard” account at $16.99 that includes 500 credits and Pro services that can get you to some pretty insane speeds. You can actually dial into a blazingly-fast computer with 16 CPUs, 4 GPUs and 64 gigs of RAM, all over the cloud. Damn.
While the credits system is a bit confusing, CEO and Founder Nikola Bozinovic told me that they weren’t able to offer any “all-you-can-eat” at this time, and believed this was probably the most ideal pricing structure for launch.
Users can try out a free 14-day free trial of the service. Also, Bozinovic sent me a special code to share with ya’ll, TC25, which will give the first 200 TC readers who enter it $25 in credits for Frame.