Coming soon: paid plans and support, oh my

I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but emergency support sounds super appealing. Maybe you can make it work as a fixed price, but I do recall having remote-hands being billed per call/hour at some places.

While it’s not a major for us as we’ve had great ongoing service for the past 1.5 years, I would suggest updating your Plan Pricing page to indicate that emergency support is not yet available as you are advertising it as available as part of your Scale and Enterprise plans with guaranteed response times and customers can purchase Scale plans immediately.

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Oh maybe I’m wrong. I’ll get this clarified today.

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@kurt Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I understand that most customers that require BAA will be venture backed businesses or larger companies because healthcare, and by association healthcare tech, is so expensive. An indie healthcare product is not like an indie Mac app because you get what you incentivize. I personally dislike this but I understand it.

By that yardstick the pricing tier is extremely cheap, no doubt. And companies of the size necessary to enter the healthcare tech market will create more support load. They probably won’t stop yammering about ISO-27001. I don’t begrudge them that, and I don’t begrudge you the opportunity to serve those customers. They are demanding but lucrative.

However, there are apps that are custom to a practice. I am a physician and would love to build custom apps for my practice that are still HIPAA compliant because they deal with PHI. My wife runs a direct primary care practice by herself. I would love to build her a series of apps that have a user base of 2 people (physician and virtual assistant), but deal with the PHI of her patient panel. Those apps will never make money directly but they can reduce her expenses because cobbling together the infrastructure to run a direct primary care practice, though achievable in a way that was impossible even 10 years ago, is still not cheap. If you want a HIPAA compliant messaging system or other digital infrastructure you get gouged because no one in healthcare cares one whit about the cost outside of markets like direct primary care.

Not everything in healthcare has to make money. I say let a thousand apps bloom and focus on interoperability instead of oligopoly, but I still want those tiny apps, my apps, to be secure first and foremost, but also legally compliant. And I can’t do that, by the letter of the law, without a BAA.

There would never be a business case for even a suite of apps custom to a practice where the user base is two people if the hosting and infrastructure was $499/month, but I don’t expect your business to cater to my insignificant sliver of the market and my quixotic quest to democratize healthcare tech infrastructure. Thanks again for not dismissing me out of hand. Maybe someday you’ll consider separating the support level from the BAA so I can have a BAA for my tiny, one-off apps, and you can get adequately compensated by the next VC backed healthcare startup out to “fix healthcare” and requiring an SLA from you.

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I’m tracking this topic because I ran into a technical issue on fly.io’s side a few weeks back and community support doesn’t seem to solve anything (it hasn’t been fixed/debugged).

In no way do I have a problem paying for a support plan, but it bugs me that even for issues that seem to be on your side, there is no way (that I found) to get in touch with you.

Coupling support with a paid plan is fine, as long as it pertains to configuration tips, application related issues et cetera. As soon as there is a real issue that might be fly.io related, I guess there needs to be a “free” option to contact you. You could bill the customer if in the end it turns out that it was their fault.

I am hesitant to deploy more on fly knowing that things might break and there is no way to contact you without signing up for a paid plan. I feel like I’m already a paying customer (PPU). If your PPU rates are too low to offer technical support (in the sense of technical/fly.io issues), maybe you should increase those rates.

I’m currently spending a few thousand a month on hosting with other providers, so it’s not that I don’t want to spend the $99/month, but the simple thought that that’s what it takes to get technical issues solved, is upsetting.

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That’s fair, and I’ve definitely felt the same way when I’ve spent money places. You’re stuck in a weird tweener spot that we can’t handle very well yet.

Right now, we can’t keep up with support outside of paid plans. It’s not that we don’t want to, it’s more that we’re 10x bigger than we were 6 months ago and it takes time to build a support function.

It’s not exactly a money problem, we’re a very new company doing very new things. Building out support is a blend of documentation that we’re behind on and hiring subject matter experts that only happens so fast.

High quality support for paid plans is something we can do right now. For organizations that need it, I think the pricing is low enough to make that ok. I understand the hesitation, though, so it’s possible we’re just not a mature enough company for what you need.

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Update for you all! We’re tweaking the $99 plan. It now includes $99 per month of usage. The net effect is: if you’re spending >$99 per month, you get a pro plan for “free”.

This works right now, we just haven’t updated the Plans page yet. We’ll start sending emails when people pass the threshold.

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Absolutely love it, that’s fair!!

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When on a paid plan, do you also get the free allowances before the billing starts?

I just upgraded to the Pro plan, but I think because my org is named personal that the support email bounces since they are scoped by organization names…

Am I running into an edge-case here or doing something wrong?

I am not quite sure the egress charges on this, and I guess it’s not that clear to me vs the usage model.

Hi - The billing starts once you choose a paid plan. If you choose a Pro plan, then any usage up to $99 is included and you’re only charged if you end up using > $99 of usage.

Hi @SebastianSzturo - Ah, that might be an edge case! We’re looking at it and will follow up with you in email.

Hi @developthethings - Can you say more about what you mean by egress charges vs usage model? Happy to try to clarify!

Hi - The billing starts once you choose a paid plan. If you choose a Pro plan, then any usage up to $99 is included and you’re only charged if you end up using > $99 of usage.

So during a month, the billing starts immediately, and you don’t get the free allowances beforehand?

e.g. the free allowances say you get 3GB of persistent storage, and if I provision 6GB do I only get billed for the 3GB after the free allowance or does the full 6GB get billed and taken from the $99 credit?

@iamliamnorton ah! The free tiers still apply, we only start using your credits when you go beyond them.

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Hi I mean the usage charges, egress, transit out of the container. The biggest issue with cloud providers now and maybe for the last 10 years has been the egress out, would love to know if these new plans include this or what the new charges for this are.

Something like maxihost charge $0.00064 per GB after 20,000GB or 20TB!

There’s a trade off between orchestration and bandwidth now, the prices for egress have definitely started to plummet at the L1 network layer.

Would be good to know if you’re still charging $0.02GB and $0.04GB for Asia or if that’s going up or down? Thanks!

Got it. The usage pricing, including bandwidth, is the same for everyone. What the plans do is include usage up to a certain amount per plan. A $99 plan includes $99 worth of usage, and it’s calculated as shown on the pricing page.

We don’t have plans to offer different usage pricing based on plan tier. But we’re not really interested in making money from bandwidth pricing generally, so it’s something we’ll keep looking at.

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Thanks for the reply. It makes sense.

You are correct, everyone hates egress costs, the lower they become or if they just go away and let people build would be great. Obviously some people us 1PB and others 1GB so I can understand some pricing needs to be set.

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You all might like to know, we used your comments to help build better paid plans. Announcing: Plans for email support and compliance requirements

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