Region-specific Machines pricing

https://community.fly.io/t/fresh-produce-region-specific-machines-pricing/20690

by bishopsmother • 2 years ago

117 112 2 years ago

community.fly.io

zackify4• 2 years ago

Pretty funny that I built an app in Brazil and then this happens right before it goes live.

It would be nice to have stable pricing and not have a fear of different features costing more out of the blue.

Other than this, fly has been a great service, I love the system, the CLI and litefs.

It scares me that internal bandwidth charges will start being added, the application I’m using has a lot of internal transfer which is currently free.

davedx• 2 years ago

The nice thing about Fly is it’s very docker oriented, so depending on your app migrating it off may be fairly straightforward?

My apps are all on Fly but in the regions without big hikes thankfully, so I’m sticking around for now, but it sucks some people are being hit by this…

zackify4• 2 years ago

Technically you are right. However my app is using litefs. In theory you could set this up on your own servers. Which is part of the reason I was so interested in it.

However with fly it’s just one command to add a new region and my data is auto replicated there.

That’s super nice compared to manually managing this.

As long as bandwidth costs do not go up drastically I think it’ll be okay.

estebarb• 2 years ago

Internal bandwidth price is free? I decided to avoid Fly.io because the pricing page suggests it is not:

"Any traffic exiting a Fly.io Machine is considered outbound data transfer, including:

- traffic destined for the internet - traffic destined for other Machines or apps in your network"

zackify4• 2 years ago

I have many edge nodes with data being synced to them internally with liteFS. This is free

Edit: maybe you are right actually. I have to check on this closer. App is just about to launch so I hadn’t paid so much attention

miyuru• 2 years ago

Did you know it costs us twice as much to rack a server in São Paulo?

There is an interesting dynamic of server prices and customer spend in different parts of the world.

Usually where the server prices are high, customers spend less.

vasco• 2 years ago

There's also physical limits though, and structural economic lag in terms of investment. If you look at any CDN costs globally and compare it with the number of intercontinental fiber connections between those places you generally start having a good idea that the two are related. In some places there's also just less qualified talent (due to having less ability to train people in enough universities, or just not having them for as long) and datacenter space built and extra import costs that delay everything.

At some point everything will saturate and probably energy production costs will dominate (largely for cooling), but I think we're still a bit far from that.

felipeac• 2 years ago

In the case of Brazil it's mainly due to our absurd import taxes.

Xunjin3• 2 years ago

Do you have numbers to support it? If you mean import of hardware that do makes sense, but what about hardware that's already here? (I'm also Brazilian)

Looking at AWS site it explains that PIS/COFINS and ISS are charged, excerpt below:

"AWS SBL can issue an NFS-e to a Bra zilian customer only after receiving a valid Tax Registration Number ("TRN") (i.e., CPF/CNPJ). The relevant taxes applicable to AWS cloud services offered locally are the following: PIS and COFINS (9.25%, combined rate) and ISS (2.9%, charged by São Paulo municipality)."

https://aws.amazon.com/tax-help/Brazil/

This is below 15% which many countries do tax for cloud services.

I'm not saying that Brazilian taxes are really high, they are for hardware imports, but the taxes into the service itself does seem "fair".

thedangler• 2 years ago

Great!, then I'd rather my app be a littler slower for those people if it saves me money. If the latency is not noticeable, why pay more to have that edge hosted.

hypeatei• 2 years ago

Recently evaluated Fly.io for a company project but decided against it. I get the vibe that it fits the hobby/side project market more and that they're still in startup mode.

vdfs• 2 years ago

They did remove the hobby plan too

gitinit2• 2 years ago

It can still be used for free as from my experience and the docs, monthly bills under $5 are free.

x0x02• 2 years ago

fwiw, we deploy on fly and are happy with it.

The reason to like fly is you get a 20-ish line yaml file that replaces (and I'm not exaggerating) thousands of lines of cloudformation. It automagically sets up the equivalent of a load balancer, autoscaling group, VPCs, db, vpn, etc. And it's trivial to replicate that environment per employee.

Plus the autoscaling using their firecracker stuff is fast.

I'd recommend most companies who aren't using tons of aws services take a hard look at fly.

bibabaloo• 2 years ago

Looks like they've quietly (?) deprecated the hobby plan too. Getting 3 instances a month for free was probably too good to be true forever..

4ggr0• 2 years ago

Why do you think that? Still visible here: https://fly.io/plans/personal

I hope they don't cancel this plan, currently on it :D

EDIT: Ohh, it's only visible when I'm logged in, weird...

EDIT2: ...indeed

The paid Hobby plan and the Legacy Hobby plan are not available for new sign-ups.

https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/

damn :(

If you were on the free Hobby plan at the time that the paid Hobby plan became the default for new organizations, your plan is now called the Legacy Hobby plan. Your costs stay the same as they were, with no monthly subscription fee, and no included usage beyond the free resource allowances.

so i get to use the legacy hobby plan because i'm grandfathered in, nice. only use it for a hobby project with one instance anyways(see bio), if they really decide to start charging me i'll gladly leave.

throwaway74566• 2 years ago

Heya, we deprecated pretty loudly! We made a post on the community forum [0] and we sent an email to all active accounts saying the following:

The first improvement we're excited to announce is that the $5 Hobby plan is no more. We're replacing it with a very simple Pay As You Go plan. On this plan there's no more upfront $5 charge and no minimum monthly commitment. You only pay for what you use. If you don't use anything for a given month you pay $0. You still need a credit card on file to prevent abuse. But your card is only charged if you use the service.

[0] https://community.fly.io/t/fresh-produce-pay-as-you-go-plan/...

dathinab• 2 years ago

random side note, it would be nice if the region selector for regional pricing would display human readable region labels in addition to 3 letter acronyms.

Aeolun3• 2 years ago

Why a throwaway?

d-z-m• 2 years ago

If you're going to stand behind your product, I'm not sure posting with a throwaway sends the strongest message.

itake5• 2 years ago

I didn’t get this email. I don’t check the forums for announcements

gregors• 2 years ago

Whoa, they did get rid of it. Not surprising in the least, but they definitely did it with a minimum of fanfare. When Heroku got rid of their free plans at least they were upfront and released a blog post about it. Maybe they did and I just didn't notice.

jsheard• 2 years ago

How has Flys reliability been as of late? From past discussions I got the impression that despite it being quite polished on the surface, behind the scenes their operations are a bit of a mess.

e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36808296

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365735

pgt• 2 years ago

From personal experience, still not great. Sometimes things just don't deploy.

I host my little mobile braai simulator on it (braaisim.com) because it's an art project and easy to add new domains / certificates. Convenient to be able to scale up easily if it went viral in ZA. Nice that they support Johannesburg region (jnb), though, which is close to me.

burningion• 2 years ago

You were downvoted, but as a user, I’ve experienced the same inconsistency with deploys.

There’s also a hard container size limit I’ve run into multiple times. If you add a dependency and go over the size limit, your app won’t deploy unless you switch to a GPU instance, which is substantially more expensive.

Aeolun3• 2 years ago

I get the impression that the operations are a bit of a mess too, but that support is empowered to actually make people whole, which is a nice change of pace.

oefrha• 2 years ago

which is a nice change of pace

That’s about every early stage company, though.

urschrei• 2 years ago

I see two sibling comments with reports of patchy reliability, so I'll note that it's been rock-solid for me (multiple daily deploys every weekday) since I last commented on it (about a year ago?)

zackify4• 2 years ago

A bunch of mini outages and the main site + dashboard was out for maybe an hour last week on Thursday.

my production app has had 1 outage where stripe webhooks weren’t delivering for 45 minutes which is a huge issue for sure.

I mitigated by checking in addition to the webhook event and also it hasn’t had a problem since. Their explanation was a 3rd party networking issue at or near one of their data centers

matthewmacleod• 2 years ago

Bad enough that we had to migrate our key customer-facing platform off of it because of the impact.

I love the idea and will still use it for many less-business-critical apps but after multiple late-night weird un-debuggable database outages we had to switch.

no_exit• 2 years ago

The very first time I tried to spin up a test deploy the instance never came online, which I thought was pretty funny. This was like 6 months ago.

itake5• 2 years ago

They upgraded my server and it was down for about 8 hours. They warned me about the upgrade, but didn’t tell me they failed to restart my server.

manchmalscott• 2 years ago

To provide at least one positive example, I'm using fly.io to host a website I made for a friend (for her college capstone project), so I'm on the now-legacy hobby plan paying nothing, and I have had zero problems.

fideloper• 2 years ago

I use it to power CI builds (a lot of them!) and have extremely little issue with it.

Basically I’m just using the API to spin up machines, which do some work and shut down. There’s some extra machines per build job, like database containers or a headless browser for testing. Pretty smooth in my experience.

I think the only occasional issue I hit is the internal DNS being a few seconds behind reality.

tptacek12• 2 years ago

You're not entirely unbiased about this. :)

tptacek12• 2 years ago

https://fly.io/infra-log/

Detailed description of every incident (a superset of "outages"), including stuff not visible enough to make the status page, going back to April.

prettyflyboy• 2 years ago

Semantics aside, if an incident/outage/<other term> affects devs/users in any way, it really should be on the status page.

I found it impossible to distinguish between user error and platform outage. Too often it was a problem on fly's end yet the status page gave nothing (perplexed, I'd rerun the deploy a few hours later and it would work).

Can't stress it enough: if fly's services aren't working for any reason, big or small, put it on the status page. Devs need to know when something's not in their control so they can inform their team and customers and go to bed or take a coffee break. They shouldn't be up till 5am thinking they borked something when the problem is 100% on fly's end.

r08k4n3• 2 years ago

Database server connections just die and don't heal.

Apps get scaled down to 0 despite setting minimum running applications.

Our logshipper just stopped working for a week.

Our apps occasionally just stop working.

The worst part is that I could cope with the above if they communicated the issues.

They don't. They make major changes - "improvements", break stuff regularly, acknowledge that they broke stuff in the forums, but don't communicate to those affected.

I am seriously considering going elsewhere - and I really don;t want to. The intention is good, but I am not convinced that they are stable enough for people to gamble their businesses on it just yet...

bvrlt• 2 years ago

Fly.io and Render.com are alternatives to Heroku. How do the two compare in terms of maturity? Can they both be trusted with production apps?

MobileVet• 2 years ago

We looked at both and chose Render based on various posts here along with our real world testing and bake off parameters. We use the Pro Ultra config and handle ~20rps on a Node / Express stack w/ 36 workers using clustering. Our bandwidth is around 50Gb / month.

Render has been quite solid and the support has been on point when we have found issues or run into unexpected edge cases. I have been impressed that despite a big raise and subsequent scaling up, they continue to ship a solid product and the platform improvements have been useful as well.

calyhre• 2 years ago

Never used Fly.io but I have a website running on Render (2.4M unique users per month) and the service is getting quite nice. Occasional hiccups, but they are improving. Not as stable as Heroku used to be 7-8 years ago yet, but it's also waaaaay cheaper.

I really like their Docker support and infra as code, makes it very easy to spin up a whole thing while not being too far conceptually from Kubernetes for example.

smallerfish• 2 years ago

I have services running on each. Fly's more flexible. Render's further from the metal, and thus somewhat more limited.

Both have some reliability issues and rough edges. My new stuff is mostly on Fly, but I'd use Render where I had a junior team who had zero infra chops.

x0x02• 2 years ago

Running production app on fly. There have been some hiccups but generally we're quite happy with it.

neom• 2 years ago

Don't know if anyone noticed, but Ben Johnson recently became head of product over there. I'm fortunate to have called Ben a friend for a long ass time now and I gotta say, I'm extremely bullish on fly as a result of this. Ben is not just a developers developer, he's genius level intelligence. https://github.com/benbjohnson

(We fumbled the ball hard at DigitalOcean ngl, fingers crossed Ben can build what I dreamed of building one day!)

tyre• 2 years ago

What/why do you think DO fumbled? Fly looks like what DO could have been, and they had a 10 year head start.

ericcholis• 2 years ago

I'm curious as well. Pretty happy with DO overall; but it is relatively vanilla as far as a hosting product goes.

PUSH_AX• 2 years ago

I’ll be bullish on fly when the awful outages stop. They had a hardware outage in the LHR region for a month, it was probably longer but I moved to a different provider so I haven’t bothered to check.

tptacek12• 2 years ago

https://fly.io/infra-log/

brigadier1323• 2 years ago

This is painful, I was building for fly.io because of their dynamic request routing but I'm thinking I'm just going to go with hetzner. The cost difference is so substantial. If I want high availability I can just get 5 servers and have that much more compute available and I'd still end up paying less.

danpalmer• 2 years ago

This same argument applies to most cloud hosting, non-cloud (or less cloudy, Hetzner is a little cloudy) will always be cheaper because the service is more basic in a number of ways.

Fly’s pitch is not just on demand scalable compute, but also that compute being close to the edge, and with “ops-less” deployments. All of those are factors you pay for.

You could pay a little less with a big cloud provider’s serverless platform, a bit less again with regular cloud VMs, a lot less with colo hardware, and a ton less running your own DC (at scale). Obviously not all of these work for all businesses, but saying Hetzner is cheaper than Fly misses the point of those two services on the spectrum of service levels.

brigadier1323• 2 years ago

I'm not missing the point of the service, I'm against the idea of infrastructure being an 84% margin business. But I guess this is what the VCs demand and some are willing to pay it.

candiddevmike• 2 years ago

For a lot of people (most...?), Hetzner gives them exactly what they're looking for at an excellent price point. As an ecosystem, we never really moved past VMs, we just went up the stack more.

jstummbillig• 2 years ago

will always be cheaper

This has me so confused. Should the cloud abstractions not clearly make the service more optimizable at scale and thus cheaper to offer? Sandboxing things, limiting options, not having to deal with users wanting to provision VMs and do all kinds of unexpected stuff? The marginal cost of the beautiful software to make all of that happen smoothly, and all the dx it affords, that will just go towards 0, no?

I understand that people ask for what they can get away with. But does the market fail or am I missing a piece of the cost/price puzzle?

hipadev234• 2 years ago

Don’t host anything important on Hetzner, as they’re cheap they get a lot of questionable users, and their systems are tuned to null route anything that looks remotely suspicious or high-volume to their hair-trigger network monitoring and DDoS protection.

And then you’re at the mercy of whatever support agent decides to look at your ticket and that can take days.

Use literally anyone but Hetzner is my advice.

matdehaast• 2 years ago

I've been using it for years with high bursty loads from users. Never had an issue with network stuff between my user and hetzner....

throwAGIway• 2 years ago

I disagree, the support is very responsive. Try to let them know in advance about your plans and you will be fine.

js4ever• 2 years ago

I disagree, at my company (elest.io) we have several thousands VMs with Hetzner and reliability is very comparable to AWS from our internal stats. In case of DDOS attack we get notified and can discuss with their team.

Also support is competent and quick. We usually get an answer in few hours most of the time.

itake5• 2 years ago

there is no way Hetzner is worse than fly for uptime. Fly has deleted my db, taken servers offline for hours, and expired tls certs for hours without telling me.

scandox• 2 years ago

Years of excellent uptime with Hetzner here. Almost decades.

theallan• 2 years ago

Adding another one to say that I've only have a positive experience with Hetzner so far. 6 months in, and 4 machines. All doing fine.

hstaab• 2 years ago

Hetzner has been fantastic for us for many reasons. I’m not convinced the problems you ran into are Hetzner specific.

whalesalad5• 2 years ago

If I want high availability I can just get 5 servers and have that much more compute available and I'd still end up paying less.

Please give us an update here when you are done building your hetzner beowulf cluster and let us know how it fares. I think you are grossly underestimating the system you describe.

brigadier1323• 2 years ago

I don't want a cluster, I just want a load balancer that can connect users to the machine I want.

zamadatix• 2 years ago

Whether this is completely out of the box or a multi-year engineering project to get equivalent levels of utility in the long term is completely up to how one specifically uses Fly.io.

E.g. a load balancer in front of some relatively stateless http microservices is really not going to tie you to Fly.io because of complexity. A globally distributed edge compute environment with database, RPC, varying scaling patterns, and environment certifications is probably not going to have the value prop impacted by this kind of minor pricing change though.

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 years ago

Hi, professional sysadmin here. I've run production deployments across hundreds of machines in Hetzner; it scales fine. The only real problem is that Hetzner is so much cheaper than anything else that it's easy to get a little bit stuck. (Honestly, that was a fun job in a lot of ways. Oh well.)

tptacek12• 2 years ago

We're sorry. I hope we're clearly expressing what's happening here: either we do flat pricing globally, so that people deploying in cheaper regions subsidize those deploying in more expensive ones, or we reflect our cost basis in our prices and let our customers (and prospective customers, like you) make their own choices.

In your specific situation: it really just is the case that Brazil soaks us on import fees. Getting machines in racks in Brazil is just crazy expensive. We're going to keep doing it! Brazil has too many good sandwiches. But the idea behind building a new public cloud on our own hardware is for us to be around for the long haul, and flat low global pricing is not a "long haul" decision.

(It wasn't a long haul decision last year, either, but building a billing system capable of expressing this stuff is a nightmare from which we have not yet fully awoken. It turned out to be a shockingly hard problem.)

There are going to be cases where places like Hetzner make a lot sense compared to us. We hope you get your thing launched and find success wherever you end up. Some of our stuff, like LiteFS, you can take with you! :)

athoscouto• 2 years ago

I think the change makes sense, even though I have workloads running on the regions that got the steepest price changes. I'd rather have more granular pricing than a blanket increase. The why now also makes sense - there was a technical limitation that doesn't exist anymore.

I was expecting a larger grace period from announcement to price change though. You got it right when you started charging for stopped volumes - you overcommunicated and gave users estimates for a few months before you started charging. Smoothing the increase over the next 4 months was nice.

A couple of nits as well: - AFAIK prices increased in all but two regions. The announcement could be clearer or more direct regarding this. - The pricing page could have a clearer from/to. I have to click on the example toggle to know how much machines cost before the change.

TiredOfLife• 2 years ago

They currently cost 4 times more than Hetzner.

Aeolun3• 2 years ago

The big benefit of fly is that your server only costs money when it’s doing something (with autoscaling enabled).

sofixa• 2 years ago

Hetzner gives you bare (or virtual) metal that you have to install stuff on, and maintain it.

Fly.io and similar give you a higher abstraction layer where you throw a Docker container and the stuff below and around it is managed for you. Basic suff like OS patches, but also autoscaling, load balancing, request routing, etc.

Does the 4x difference make it up? It will depend entirely on you and how good you are with the things fly.io abstract for you, and how much you value your time spent on it.

TillE• 2 years ago

HN always mentions Hetzner, but they're no longer an exceptionally cheap VPS provider. They're basically the same price as OVH.

I forget when exactly they raised their prices, but it was several years ago.

tptacek12• 2 years ago

If you are literally just looking for a place to cost-effectively park a VM, you should very seriously consider Hetzner! It would be weird if there weren't use cases where Hetzner comes out ahead.

benatkin• 2 years ago

our billing system has been hot garbage for most of the life of the company

I’ve heard the same thing about their core product.

Oh wait, they even acknowledged it: https://community.fly.io/t/reliability-its-not-great/11253

goykasi• 2 years ago

So, hosting in Japan is more expensive than regions in America? JPY is in a horrible place compared to USD. That seems like a good way to push away Japanese users away -- make it more expensive in countries where the local currency is weak.

siliconc0w• 2 years ago

Fly is the only place I can get a lambda-like application with an attached SSD. Tigris is cool too (s3-alike but faster for our use case).

FWIW, I haven't had too many reliability concerns but I have had some issues with builder VMs (can always build locally so no big deal) or non-prod environments with just one instance.

lilouartz• 2 years ago

Very happy with Fly.io. My website Pillser runs on it and I never had issues with them. The cost per month us just under USD 100 for hosting 3 services, including the database.

HorizonXP• 2 years ago

I get that this stings, but honestly, outside of the brief outages when I'm trying to deploy for the millionth time, it's been a dream to run on Fly, with instances close to my users.

It's too bad the closest region to Dubai is Romania, and Africa/SE Asia are a bit uncovered, but that's ok for now. I'm really enjoying using LiteFS and globally distributed instances for each customer, making it really easy, fast, and scalable. As the sole dev on the team right now, this is fantastic.

I wish Upstash Kafka was a bit more baked, but I ended up just signing up with them directly. I had trouble using the built-in-to-Fly version, but that's fine.

Can't wait to give them $1000s a month.

Region-specific Machines pricing

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