I believe due to CORS and native code being used you would need a service to download NPM packages and compile binaries to WASM.
You could offer self hosting of those and no licensing for commercial products, but you then wouldn't have a financial strategy to develop the technology in the first place. Not quite as much at least.
A big draw is you don't have to give access to a 3rd party all of your code if the technology is client side. Since the server side is just managing/proxying 3rd party dependencies.
All that being said, I'd appreciate a more forthcoming statement of this, as it is confusing, bordering on misleading.
I love the technology though and I do have plans to use it.
Eric (CEO of StackBlitz) here- your explanation is 100% correct regarding why & how servers need to be used to power parts of WebContainer environments (i.e. proxying npm, git, transforming binaries, amongst a handful of other things).
Some of these operations can be cacheable which is ideal for scalability, but even the ones that cannot tend to be far cheaper than running VMs which incur by the minute CPU costs.
Our intention is to be fully transparent on the how & why, so I’m happy to answer further questions on all this! I also think it’d be good for us to include something more detailed like your explanation in our docs so that other folks don’t feel similarly confused when reading them- curious if there’s particular points that jump out to you that I can share with our team to include!
You could offer self hosting of those and no licensing for commercial products, but you then wouldn't have a financial strategy to develop the technology in the first place. Not quite as much at least.
A big draw is you don't have to give access to a 3rd party all of your code if the technology is client side. Since the server side is just managing/proxying 3rd party dependencies.
All that being said, I'd appreciate a more forthcoming statement of this, as it is confusing, bordering on misleading.
I love the technology though and I do have plans to use it.