Fly.io initiates Region-specific Machines pricing

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

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?

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.

They currently cost 4 times more than Hetzner.

> 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

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!)

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

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.