Reliability: It’s not great

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!

I'm going to plug Coolify, an open source Heroku alternative (with Docker support too) that I'm using on a cheap $5 Hetzner server which is a lot cheaper than the equivalent Fly or Render etc service, and it really doesn't have much upkeep from me even if you add in the time setting up the server initially, which is like an hour, and afterwards, it Just Works™.

https://coolify.io

Dokku is also nice and battle-tested: https://dokku.com/

And may I also plug Lunni, a self-hosted Docker Swarm-based PaaS I'm working on right now: https://lunni.dev/

Both work pretty well on $5 servers.

How do Coolify and Dokku compare? I've been aware of Dokku for a long time already, however I've never been confident enough to rely on these interfaces to deploy applications, specially because of their business model to keep things going. I'll have to try them both eventually though, I absolutely hate PaaS honestly, the prices are all just too high, but the convenience is really nice when managing a multitude of services simultaneously.

Dokku Maintainer here.

I don't really have a business model. I do take donations from Open Collective (and Github Sponsors, which funnels to OC) and there is Dokku Pro, but those don't collect anywhere near the funds I'd need to stop my dayjob (at least now. Maybe someday?).

My business model is that code releasing is something I'm pretty passionate about. Dokku isn't even originally my project (Jeff Lindsay started it, I just took it over), but I've been working on it for almost a decade. It's open source and fairly simple, so even if something happened to me, others could theoretically continue the project on as desired (or build on top of it if need be).

I'd be interested in hearing any of your other concerns though :)