Appreciate the feedback. We launched our pricing plan this week after being in private beta with a different pricing strategy. We did chat with our private beta users about what would be important to them but are very open to change pricing over time based on feedback from the community. Keep in mind we're providing more than just the execution of actions i.e. offering a visual development environment, an integrated Postgres database, instant deployment, and hosting as part of the package. That being said, we certainly see the need for a competitive pricing strategy and will reassess our rates.
As others have already said, you can get millions of executions of serverless functions for literal pennies on other platforms.
These serverless platforms already tend to cost A LOT more than running traditional servers, but your offering is 200,000 times pricier than an already costly option.
One thing to note here is that those traditional providers charge per request, while your product is priced on actions, which are blocks in the request flow. Realistically, any non-basic API will have several blocks for each request, thus considerably inflating your numbers.
To put things in perspective here, 1 Req/s is 2.5M Req/Mo which is already over your highest plan, and while it may be a considerable amount of volume for a medium app, it’s still something you could run on a $5 VPS and have 99% of your CPU sitting idle. For your proposed pricing, you could literally deploy tens or hundreds of dedicated servers around the world for each client that signs up and still end up being ridiculously overpriced.
As another example, given the current Reddit debacle, we know that an average user of theirs makes ~380 API Req/day. This means that 175 users would saturate the 2M actions in your highest Team plan. How would you justify 30.000$ for 175 MAU?
If these prices are somehow based on your costs for hosting the API you seriously need to rethink your internal efficiency
That said, I like the style and concept of the product, but there are still too many missing features, especially to justify a price that’s many orders of magnitude higher than anyone else.
As a point of comparison - cloudflare workers costs 0.30$ for the same (2 million) requests, plus a 5$ monthly fee. If my math is correct, in their eyes the visual aspect is worth 100,000x as much?
edit: it's actually 200,000x, the cloudflare base fee includes 1 million requests. Is it possible that they added an extra couple zeros?
I also was surprised about the pricing. But it's getting a bit better if you check the FAQ. They basically dont charge for "basic" actions and 0.25 per db action. So if you just do some read and write to the db, its basically 0.25 per request.
Dont know why they hide it that crazy (usually its the other way around)...
In the end, is suspect none of these tools will be able to gatekeep hosting (especially with outrageous rates). The dev process is their key offering, not hosting. The moat on hosting will be nil, totally commoditized. If they were totally charitable, this would be an open source tool letting people export stuff.
Anybody could build that, and someone probably will.
I agree that the pricing for 2M actions is so high, that why even show it? But this doesn't seem like a typical use case for rapid prototyping, which is what this seems to be made for