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by nextaccountic 1614 days ago
Hey, talking about friction.. in your pricing page you say https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/#managed-ssl-certificates

> Managed SSL certificates

> We use Lets Encrypt to issue certificates, and donate half of our SSL fees to them at the end of each calendar year.

> Single hostname certificates > Free for the first 10 > $0.10/mo for additional certificates

> Wildcard certificates: $2/mo

So, if my pet project needs a wildcard certificate from the get go, I go from $0/month to $2/month before writing a single line of code... can I at least run acme on my own to cut this expense, or this is prohibited?

Actually, to think about it.. Let's Encrypt is free. Is charging for it a significant revenue stream? I would love to see the rationale for that, because it seems to me that this hits small customers disproportionately.
1 comments
mrkurt 1614 days ago
The infrastructure to manage and distribute certificates is pretty complicated, and doing support for certificate issues is expensive. This is why we bill for them. More details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22624262

For people who need a whole bunch of certificates, the price hasn't been an issue.

The problem with services that are free at any scale is that there's never an incentive to make them any good. Most of our certificate infrastructure improvements have been done because people who were trying to give us money were having a hard time of it.

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nextaccountic 1613 days ago
Fair enough. Indeed I didn't consider support costs. Thank you for your answer!

Actually let me ask another thing. Your FAQ mentions you're considering hosting CockroachDB as a drop-in distributed replacement for PostgreSQL [0], and also you currently offer a distributed, eventually consistent PostgreSQL replication solution [1].

Is either Tikv [2] (distributed key-value store) or Tidb [3] (distributed database with a mysql interface, built on top of Tikv) on your radar?

You already offer Redis as a key-value store, but Tikv has an amazing property: it ensures strong consistency globally (not eventual consistency). Tidb, being built on top of Tikv, also has strong consistency.

[0] https://fly.io/blog/fly-answers-questions/#q-what-is-fly-doi...

[1] https://fly.io/blog/globally-distributed-postgres/

[2] https://github.com/tikv/tikv

[3] https://github.com/pingcap/tidb

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