[doctor_eval]

I gotta say, this comment really comes across as being written by someone who has quite literally never tried Netlify, or doesn’t understand the value prop at all.

Seriously, it is orders of magnitude faster to deploy a static website on Netlify - simply drag and drop a folder from desktop - than it is to spin up just a single VPS on Vultr… and by the time you’ve configured that VPS, I could have done a dozen revisions to the website, and it would still be more difficult to deploy updates to the VPS than to Vultr. Don’t even get me started on the complexity of a global CDN.

Do I wish all of Netlify was free? Sure, yes I do. Does this mean it’s not valuable? Of course not.

The irony of this is that you seem to be saying that (a) Netlify locks the customer in with useless features, and (b) it can be trivially reimplemented in an entirely custom but otherwise “free” VPS.

The real question is, which “free” VPS are you going to use that will serve the same capacity as Netlify’s paid plans? AWS? Do you think you can avoid lock-in using AWS - of all things?!

[shiftpgdn]

Oracle's free ARM VM offering can easily serve the same degree (actually significantly more) than a Netlify deployment.

[doctor_eval]

You’re really going to have to provide some figures to substantiate this. Bandwidth, volume and global TTFB would be a good start.

Also, by your own standards this is a comparison between a paid Netlify account and a free VM. Right?

[shiftpgdn]

No, you asked for a free comparison. If you want to go to paid features netlify loses by a mile. You can search all of this yourself with all of one google query.

[doctor_eval]

I didn't ask for anything. I am just responding to your comment. You said:

> Almost every feature you charge for is something you can achieve for free inside of a basic VPS

I have plenty of experience with both Netlify and VMs, and I don't think they are even remotely comparable.

> You can search all of this yourself with all of one google query.

You're the one making the claims - I'm not even sure what I would be searching for since the parameters of a VM are vastly different to those for Netlify. How could I even find TTFB for a free Oracle VM? In fact, my personal experience with Oracle VMs (granted it's from before 2018) is that the jitter would be very high, such that any TTFB would probably be meaningless. And it would depend on the deployment region, too. Not to mention the HTTP server being used.

Words are cheap. Unless you're willing to substantiate your claims with some actual facts, nobody learns anything.

[Takennickname]

You are definitely getting much much more with a free VPS than with netlify. Netlify's value is in being easy, not cheap. If your argument is for being cheap then you will lose that argument all day, every day.

[doctor_eval]

You really need to explain this. Honestly. Actual numbers.

Netlify’s free plan is awesome. You might get more bandwidth with a VPS. But you won’t get a CDN and you won’t get atomic deployments without a bunch of work. You’ll use half your VPS storage on the operating system. You’ll need to keep updating your software and maintaining backups. You’ll spend hours or weeks a year maintaining this thing, versus zero for Netlify.

It’s not just about the cost of bandwidth or storage. You gotta compare like with like.