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Client-side compute is the only web model scaling to a billion users

Eric Simons · Inside Bolt: From near-death to one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons · Mar 13, 2025 · at 22:42

StackBlitz/Bolt CEO Eric Simons explains why executing compute inside the user's browser rather than provisioning cloud VMs is essential for scale.

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“If you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web, they've all had this compute model, right? Figma, when you open a Figma document, there's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you to render the documents you're dragging things around. It's using your CPU and your memory to do the work. Same thing with Google Docs, right? That's the only model that's ever scaled to a billion users.”

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