Similar remote browser testing services I'll be testing soon:

    http://saucelabs.com/
    http://crossbrowsertesting.com/
    http://www.browserstack.com/

Some of these even do mobile browsers too. After spending several hours setting up just 1 or 2 VMs, I'm convinced using these services is not only cheaper and more stress-free but also lets you keep more up to date.

Thank you for mentioning these. I tried BrowserStack and got so much value from the free 30min trial (found & fixed several IE8 bugs) that it was a no-brainer to sign up for a monthly plan.

Even the tunneling to a local Vagrant instance, with a subdomain (through lvh.me), worked simply and flawlessly. I couldn't have asked for a better experience.

We've been loving BrowserStack, particularly all the mobile emulators they've got available. Something like two dozen Android devices.

This is nice, but it suffers from the same flaw all the other virtual browser services suffer from: No pay by the minute/hour. I probably only need 1 or 2 hours with IE 8 every month or two.

Honestly, if it's not worth 20 bucks a month to you, you probably aren't in their target market (deliberately priced out of it, for good reason).

Depends, when you look at it another way $20 a month is almost your own virtual server with windows on it.

If it saves me ~30mins/month then it has paid for itself

It is going to cost you way more than $20 of your time to download/update/manage/run these VMs.

No per-minute plan, but Saucelabs gives you 30 minutes per month for free. $12/month for unlimited. It works great. https://saucelabs.com/docs/manual