Reliability: It’s not great

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!

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.

But our team, who has used Heroku for over a decade, got bit multiple times by Heroku having a free tier.

Why were we impacted by other apps? Because Heroku’s load balancers are shared amongst all their apps. That includes all the sketchy apps running on the platform.

If Heroku could somehow isolate us from everyone else? Great - and they offered that for awhile with a reasonably-priced Add-On supported by them called SSL Endpoint. It cost about $15/month and put us into a pool that was shared with other folks willing to spend that much per month to run their app.

I understand that’s not great for a hobby project. But for those of us trying to run a large product on Heroku and not have to spend multiple extra thousands of dollars every month for a Heroku Private Space, this was a great way of pooling: put a small fee in place for one pool of resources. Not many malware writers or other misbehaving app creators will probably want to spend that much per month.

But they axed that a few years ago. Only a couple months after when we were thrown back into the load balancer pool with all the other free apps, one of the IPs was marked as spam and we had to figure out a kind of janky solution.

Additionally, Heroku seemingly spent a ton of resources on free tier support, malware fighting, etc. I hope to see more features on Heroku since they’ve dropped that support… but I haven’t seen much evidence of that in roughly six months since they did that. But we’ll see.