Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it

What do people get out of using special services like Fly.io instead of standard VMs like the ones you can get from $5/month these days?

Can anybody who uses Fly.io explain their rationale? Why do the additional integration with Fly.io, trust and install their special software on your machines and tie your project into their ecosystem?

What type of application are you running? How many users are using it?

There's a sweet spot of early startup or side project where you don't have the time, budget or people to manually set up and maintain servers on your own or deal with the complexity and cost of Kubernetes or AWS, especially when your focus is on building the product and acquiring customers.

Heroku (before its inevitable enshittification under Salesforce) was great for this use case. Sure you will outgrow it at some point, and it did get expensive, but when you just want to throw up an MVP with minimum fuss and maintenance you could do much worse.

What exactly does Fly.io give you?

You already know how to set up your project locally. Why not just do the same setup on any cloud VM and boom it is online?