Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

The only thing I don't like is their usage-based pricing. On Heroku I could pay $7 a month and know I'd never be charged more than that. I'm sure when you're scaling a service it's fine - maybe even better - to do it on a sliding scale. But for a fire-and-forget blog site, I don't want to have to worry about stuff like that.

This is a problem. And a bit of an own goal on our part.

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.

I don’t want an unlimited bandwidth promise, I want a cap that I know can never be exceeded. I mean, I use Azure professionally and one of the key reasons I don’t use it to host my own stuff is exactly because it could potentially become very expensive. I’d rather have my own stuff shut down until I decide what I want to do with it.

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.

We actually launched with that feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857

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. :)