RStudio is the go-to tool for programmers working in R. Frequently organizations will want to centralize their R work or provide web-based access to a compute environment. Although RStudio Server has an “open source edition”, most of the useful administrative functionality is locked behind the rather-expensive RStudio Server Pro version ($10k USD/year). This price isn’t sustainable for many organizations, or might not otherwise be worth it if there are only a few potential users.

Doing scientific computing is hard. Delivering results with fast, performant code is often the easy part. You know your tools and how to get results. Delivering your workflow to your target audience is where it gets tough. What happens if your clients want to re-run things themselves, on their own hardware? How do they configure your pipeline for a new problem set? What happens if they’ve never even used the command line before, much less understand what a server is?