I hate services that don't put a price on things like bandwidth (because there's always a price!). So we priced bandwidth and made it transparent. You can put an app on Fly.io and server petabytes of data every month, if you want. We'll never complain that you're serving the wrong content type.
But the reality is – having an unlimited bandwidth promise is perfect for for a fire and forget blog site. We're not doing ourselves any favors with scary pricing for that kind of app.
Things like alerts are fine, professionally, but not for things like running a small app, blog or whatever, that you’re not sure where is heading.
I don’t think anything I’ve build on my own time has ever ended up breaking my bank, but signing up my credit card is a risk I’m never going to take, and I’m fairly certain I’m not alone in that. Of course I have no idea if there are enough of us to make small scale fixed prices products profitable at scale.
No one took us up on it. What we found is that the majority of people want their stuff to stay up, and the right UX for "shut it down so you don't get billed" is not obvious.
We ended up implementing prepayment instead. If you sign up and buy $25 in credit, we'll just suspend your apps when the credit runs out.
Bandwidth is weird because we have to pay for it (as does every other provider). We aren't yet in a position where we can just make it free without limits. Maybe next year. :)
It's understandable if your usage data showed the fee-capping feature just wasn't popular enough to be worth maintaining, though that would surprise me based on this thread (but possibly HN just isn't representative of the whole market)
Do they just decide to not profit from bandwidth or are they doing something special that allows them to be so cheap?
1. Put servers where bandwidth is cheap (not Sydney, for example)
2. Constrain throughput per server
3. Buy from cheap transit providers like Cogent
Hetzner does all three. Bandwidth in the US/EU is very cheap. They meter total throughput on their services. And they use cheap providers. None of these are bad choices, just different than ours.
Our product has multiple layers, too. When you connect to a Fly app, you hit our edge, then traffic goes to a VM that's probably in another region. When you hit a hetzner server, there are no intermediate hops.
We usually pay that three times as data moves from customer VMs to our edges to end users (out from our edge to worker vm, out from worker vm to our edge, out from our edge to end user). Or 10x, in some cases, if data moves from Virginia to Chennai to an end user.
We pay $0.005/GB in the US and $0.9/GB in Chennai. You can see how this might add up. :)
Obviously, you would need to manage servers,colo,network and keep it up on your own, or pay for it. And cloud providers offer alot of value as well. but if you are at the right scale you can diy it (in-house ops/network team) you can save ALOT of money.
And for customers, it's far easier to negotiate billing disputes then to try and recover from an account deletion because of spending caps (and there have been plenty of examples of companies shutting down because of such a mistake here).
With Heroku it is stupidly simple to get things going, no credit cards, "fire and forget". Works great for hobby projects, and examples you want to show.
> we'll just suspend your apps when the credit runs out.
This sounds great! I've looked at Fly.io before but didn't realise this was a thing so didn't go past looking. I'll definitely give Fly.io a test run now. :)
I ended up swallowing the bill but will not be using them again since this is plain scary.
Edit: funny thing - to add insult to injury, I've started to hear from their sales people on "my growth plans", even though I've had a support ticket hoping to resolve this to no avail.
Service providers come to the opposite problem. Local infra sucks, the market is full of incumbents, and india is generally protective of those markets.
Very similar dynamics with china as well.
Anything with production usage and pay-as-you-go pricing means data at rest still costs money - and requires deleting to avoid accruing new charges. Do you want your databases and volumes and object storage deleted when your app stops?
And if this was offered then there would be a whole new class of mistakes leading to lost data. Like I said, billing is easier to negotiate than deleted accounts.
"I want to cap the amount of data I store to 50GB and the amount of traffic I serve to 1000GB"
Of course there is an obvious problem with this, the pricing structure would become transparent and you don't want that as a cloud provider. You want your customer to just pay his bills and not even know why it costs this much.
A lot of people try to get hobby users on a platform as a form of PR -- if you don't have spending caps, you are probably going to scare a lot of them away.
And I've never heard a company shutting down because they exceeded a limit -- I've only heard of people being surprised by unintended extremely high bills.
And storage costs are simple to predict -- as soon as you see the cap would be exceeded, stop accepting new data.
This kind of pacing and billing buffer is an immense amount of complexity at scale for very little benefit (even if an individual user might like it).
SaaS companies manage to pull of ridiculously complicated things, but coming up with a billing scheme that does fuck over the customer is asking too much?
The simple truth is that usage based pricing is designed to be unpredictable, and surprising customers with high bills is probably considered a feature, not a bug.
The billing scheme is very transparent and friendly by being pay-as-you-go. It doesn't "fuck over the customer".
Your entire complaint isn't about the pricing scheme but about an additional feature to stop billing at some point - which I've explained is not easy to calculate precisely because charges accrue on time and adding even more complexity for calculations and potential for mistakes is not worth it for the many reasons I outlined previously.
> "The simple truth"
You keep repeating that word. There is nothing simple about this. Let's end this here.
How is the pricing structure not currently transparent? What number are you missing exactly?
Since data accrues charges over time, there is no alternative if you want a hard cap. Which is why none of this is very simple at all and requires a tremendous amount of planning and complexity just to implement, let alone all the possible new issues and mistakes it creates for customers.
Again, this is the typical "write some code in a weekend" approach that's missing all context of what it actually takes. And as I mentioned before, it's far easier to just negotiate billing then to deal with the aftereffects of whatever service and data disruption this feature would cause for the tiny fraction of customers that end up with this problem.
Waving your $5 fee is far easier and cheaper than spending millions on trying to avoid it in the first place, only to get replaced with potential complains that a production account was suspended or deleted.
Yes, but it's pretty predictable. Once there's enough data in your bucket that the monthly cost would go over the limit, just stop accepting new data.
Nobody cares if the spending limit is accurate to the cent. What people care about is not being surprised by huge invoices.
> The billing scheme is very transparent and friendly by being pay-as-you-go.
Have you looked at eg. the glacier pricing scheme, or at lambda pricing? It's almost impossible to know how much it's going to cost you ahead of time. The only thing you know is that if you happen to use it differently than anticipated, it's going to be expensive.
It quite literally isn't, otherwise there would be no billing surprises in the first place. Your entire argument about predictability is counter to the problem of unpredictable charges.
> "just stop accepting new data"
This is still effectively data loss and a major problem in production. Customers would rather negotiate a bill than lose data.
> "Nobody cares if the spending limit is accurate to the cent. What people care about is not being surprised by huge invoices."
Then it's a soft-cap, and if that's all you want then you already have billing alarms. Otherwise what's the buffer amount? What overage is acceptable? Is there a real hard cap? What if that's reached? You didn't actually provide any solution here.
> "the glacier pricing scheme, or at lambda pricing ... It's almost impossible to know how much it's going to cost you ahead of time."
How so? AWS is completely transparent about pricing. The calculations for it might be hard, but that's an entirely different issue. There are plenty of tools you can use if you don't want to do it yourself, however this is another logically incongruent point where you claim billing is easy enough to calculate and predict accurately for caps yet simultaneously hard enough that it's "almost impossible".
The biggest problem are mainly exorbitant bandwidth costs, and those are trivial to cap -- just stop serving requests.
Also, billing alarms are not a soft cap. They don't prevent you from waking up in the morning to a 5000€ bill.
> You didn't actually provide any solution here.
I'm commenting on the internet, I don't need to come up with a way for AWS to implement billing caps, especially since they have designed their service pricing in a way that makes estimates really hard.
But for most services, billing caps really aren't that hard, especially since the company we are discussing here (fly.io) apparently already allows billing caps if you prepay (according to other comments here).
You're just repeating this. Predictable is the opposite of surprise.
Even if storage use was very stable, so what? The overall bill is the problem so where the charges come from doesn't matter, only that eventually a limit is crossed. An overage is still an overage and the only way for billing to stop immediately is to delete and drop everything. This is the fundamental issue that you're not considering. It's what happens at the limit, not about how you get there.
> " billing alarms are not a soft cap"
Soft caps that don't actually stop anything are effectively nothing more than billing alarms. What else is their purpose?
> "I don't need to come up with a way for AWS to implement billing caps"
I didn't ask for implementation, I'm inquiring as to what logically is supposed to happen in the scenarios that occur based on your proposed "pretty simple" solution. If you can't answer then it's not so simple is it? You either haven't thought it through entirely to conclude that it's not actually possible to do that way.
> "designed their service pricing in a way that makes estimates really hard"
How so? You also keep repeating this without evidence. How is providing numbers on exactly what they charge for make it difficult? It's as transparent as it gets. They also have a calculator on their site. What more are you expecting?
> "for most services, billing caps really aren't that hard"
The nature of the service changes everything. Fly.io doesn't have billing caps, they just stop the apps when the credits run out and eat the bandwidth cost for now. The economics of scale can change that answer drastically, however even Fly repeats what I've said before: "the majority of people want their stuff to stay up" and "shut it down so you don't get billed" is usually not the preferred solution compared to negotiating a large bill.
Here's the simplest solution: If the limit is reached, stop serving requests, stop accepting new data, but don't delete any data. Allow static storage costs to go over the limit. That is probably what 99% of people who ask for a budget cap want, and it's the most logical thing to do because typically 99% of the charges are for bandwidth/requests/processing and only 1% for storage. If I set a limit at 10€ and amazon ends up charging me 10.2€ I can live with that.
The next simplest solution would be to look at how much is currently stored, multiply that with the storage cost per hour, multiply that with the remaining hours in the month, then subtract that from the monthly budget, and stop serving requests or accepting new data as soon as this lower limit is reached. This will guarantee that you never go over the limit without having to delete data. If data in storage is deleted before the end of the month, you'll end up spending less than the limit.
Now if you consider this basic math too complicated for a software engineer making $300000 a year, you could do something even simpler: allow the customer to set a limit on each resource. Eg. let the customer say, I want to limit S3 to 100GB of storage and 5TB of bandwidth and 2 million requests (or whatever). Of course that would be a bit of a hassle for the customer, but it would be very effective at preventing surprise charges.
> the majority of people want their stuff to stay up
At any cost? That's unlikely. I'm pretty sure that every company has some limit where they'd prefer the service to be down rather than pay the bill.
But if you go back up the thread you'll see that this discussion is about hobby users and tinkerers, and people who just sign up to try out the tech. These people absolutely want a hard cap on potential charges, and if you don't offer that you might scare them away.