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1226 points bishopsmother | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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samwillis ◴[] No.35046486[source]
Fundamentally I think some of the problems come down to the difference between what Fly set out to build and what the market currently want.

Fly (to my understanding) at its core is about edge compute. That is where they started and what the team are most excited about developing. It's a brilliant idea, they have the skills and expertise. They are going to be successful at it.

However, at the same time the market is looking for a successor to Heroku. A zero dev ops PAAS with instant deployment, dirt simple managed Postgres, generous free level of service, lower cost as you scale, and a few regions around the world. That isn't what Fly set out to do... exactly, but is sort of the market they find themselves in when Heroku then basically told its low value customers to go away.

It's that slight miss alignment of strategy and market fit that results in maybe decisions being made that benefit the original vision, but not necessarily the immediate influx of customers.

I don't envy the stress the Fly team are under, but what an exciting set of problems they are trying to solve, I do envy that!

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trilobyte ◴[] No.35046685[source]
> generous free level of service,

This is likely the biggest culprit for a lot of these companies. Too many of us have grown up in the culture of getting hosting and platform for "free", but at some point the companies providing it still have to pay the bills. There has to be a better pricing model that let's someone deploy their relatively small, low-traffic app for $10s/month or even $200 - $300 / year for the basics (e.g. - Heroku free tier type capabilities). It's not going to save these companies but it would limit excessive growth of their own costs from a free tier while at the same time still being affordable for 1 - 2 person teams who are trying to get something in front of users.

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1. mike_hearn ◴[] No.35048269[source]
If you don't need all that much, Oracle Cloud does offer a free tier for VMs. You get 2 AMD VMs or 4 ARM VMs and even a free Oracle DB, object storage, load balancing and monitoring.

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

It's still just a free tier so you can't expect good support, but, it's there.