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 agree - fly is so easy to use (when it works) that it’s hard not to be impressed. BUT what I’ve found is that we don’t need edge compute, since our customers aren’t that latency sensitive, so it’s lost on us. It’s only a few more milliseconds to us-east-1.

I’ve heard (on HN) of a dozen different companies vying for the heroku replacement spots and yet Fly seemed to capture the attention. I couldn’t name another one off hand.

What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl (and workflow) for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles.

Render.com is another spiritual successor of Heroku. I'd love a world where Fly and Render are both very successful companies.

Not gonna happen. Both will get acquired because that’s how things work now

(Render founder) I'd love to understand why you think this is the only outcome. Render has positive gross margin and a clear path to profitability based on both our growth so far and the tailwinds in this space. I'm also aware of other companies like ours that have grown all the way to IPO or are well on their way.

I'm very explicit both internally and externally that an acquisition is a failure mode for Render. We're building this for the very long term and plan to keep it that way.

> I'd love to understand why you think this is the only outcome.

I’m curious why you think it isn’t? On a long enough timescale all good things seem to be acquired by large megacorps for a fuckton of money.

Slack, Linode, Minecraft, the list goes on. Eventually they all make the thing less than it was before under the founders’ vision. At least from my perspective.

It won’t stop me from cheering them on, but I’m still very skeptical of them not being bought out in 10 years.

Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter (kinda), Valve all have not been acquired and have existed for a long timescale...