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by mrkurt 1290 days ago
Our pricing is a rorschach test.

If you come from Heroku, we seem too cheap: https://community.fly.io/t/comparison-of-prices-to-heroku/89...

If you are most familiar with AWS, we seem pretty close to what you're used to. But very cheap for egress.

If you are a DigitalOcean user, VMs seem pretty ok, but bandwidth seems more expensive.

If you are a CloudFlare user, you think everything else is too expensive until they try to sell you an Enterprise plan.

If you're a happy user of Hetzner or OVH, you pay something close to the same price as we do for servers. And might be surprised at our prices. Because we also want to have reasonable margins.

People really like us when they have an app that seems valuable to them, they don't want to think hard about running servers, but they do know they can "eject" and run the rest of their infra too: https://community.fly.io/t/startup-credit-program/6709/3?u=k...

3 comments

Fly.io's pricing seems fair. It's not amazingly cheap, but there aren't a lot of PaaS offerings out there and most are very expensive and have complicated pricing compared to Fly.io - even Digital Ocean's AppPlatform is more expensive.

I am curious about the freemium model for PaaS systems. I've always wondered what percent of compute ends up being free and if the paid prices have to be higher to subsidize the free tier. Would it be better for the paying customers if the service was 30% cheaper and there was no free tier? Of course, I might be incredibly far off on how much the free tier customers cost.

I think for people that think Fly.io is expensive, it just feels like what Fly.io does should be table stakes rather than a premium service in 2022 - and yet it's so hard to find! Heroku is 15 years old and Fly.io feels like the first platform I've used since that just gets it.

I would say that a collaboration between you and Neon (https://neon.tech/) would be pretty cool. While your site does link to Neon as a recommendation, Neon's datacenters often aren't that proximal to Fly.io's - Ohio isn't that close to Chicago, Virginia, or New Jersey. Maybe that'll get better in the future.

I'd always love it if Fly.io were cheaper, but more than that I'm glad that Fly.io seems to really get what customers need.

> If you are a CloudFlare user, you think everything else is too expensive until they try to sell you an Enterprise plan.

tbf, Cloudflare's Enterprise plan includes usage, too. Just like Fly's own plans: https://fly.io/plans

Besides, the Cloudflare platform is way more reliable and their products actually make it to GA :)

> If you are most familiar with AWS, we seem pretty close to what you're used to. But very cheap for egress.

But then why not just use AWS App Runner and keep everything in AWS? No egress costs and you get the best support in the industry on legitimately enterprise-grade infra. Don't like AWS? Ok, GCP has Google Cloud Run.

Why would I ever choose Fly when the competition already has a Fly-alike with global infra spend 1000x yours?