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?

Who fully sets up a significant project locally?

I used Heroku for a project mostly because my team didn't have skill set to set this up and I wasn't going to do it. As far as I know they are still on Heroku (with a smattering of AWS services) for that same reason: just works and cheaper than doing it yourself.

> Who fully sets up a significant project locally?

Who doesn't? I couldn't imagine having to push to some cloud agent and wait a random amount of time every time I want to test something. With it local I can just save, maybe rebuild or have it auto-rebuild if necessary, and test, then repeat. On a fast machine this can be a few seconds or instantaneous.

Maybe the niche I'm missing here is very "green" developers who don't know how to do any sysadmin work or deploy things.

If this is you, learn it. It pays off huge, not just during development but in being able to have a lot more choice about where you deploy and a lot more control over your own stuff.